The Luck-Based Mission is a bane to many gamers because if luck is not with you, you'll lose. The worst examples are when skill is completely removed as a factor. Regarded as frustrating at best and often an infuriating stumbling point, the games that actually feature this as a requirement are thankfully few, but still, they're present. Save Scumming is a requirement.

A particularly repellent form of Luck Based Mission is one where the game mocks you for failure. As if it's your fault that the Random Number God is displeased. Then again, inciting the Atomic F-Bomb tends to help a few types of people vent their frustration on anything other than an unrelenting computer. (Others threaten it with the junkyard.)

This trope is particularly vexing for speedrunners; gamers can pour as much practice as they want into perfecting skill-based portions of the game, but that won't stop their speedruns from being ruined by one bit of bad luck. Ditto with score attackers, who find that a significant portion of their points come from luck-based elements.

Tropes Are Not Bad stand, since a game can have a luck factor without being unfair to the player, some games are meant to have randomness so you can adapt to it, the game may point that what is coming next is going to be decided on your luck, a videogame can have elements of gambling, and party games can get away with sections where the winner is decided on pure chance.

Examples

One particular Heart Piece to be found in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time where the player must pay a slowly moving grave digger 10 rupees to dig in certain areas he walks across. What the grave digger finds when he digs is completely random, from a few rupees, to the valuable Heart Piece, and even nothing at all. Due to the nature of this, getting this Heart Piece can be a quick and painless walk to the graveyard at night or an extremely long and arduous affair that wastes all of your rupees.

This is still better than the buried Heart Piece in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: 80 rupees for 30 seconds of digging in a vast field. Thankfully there is a good source of income in the Light World version of the nearby village, and it's not uncommon to find more than your 80 rupees back. And if you're not above glitching, you can speed up the process with your boomerang.

Also two such heart pieces in Oracle of Seasons/Ages. One of them drops randomly when you run into Maple the witch; the other comes from a Gasha Tree. There are rings that can be worn to increase the chances of these random drops, but they're still rare.

Try to collect all 64 rings in these games and keep your sanity intact. Probably more than half of them are gotten sheerly through blind, dumb luck—even some that are won as prizes from mini-games. Not to mention a few that are so rare you'll have a better chance of winning your local lottery than obtaining the particular ring in these two games.

Another Oracle of Ages example. To get the Boss Key in the Mermaid's Cave, the player has to pull the correct lever in a certain room; the wrong lever makes a bunch of snakes fall from the ceiling. Each lever pull also resets which lever is the "correct" one, such that the player could theoretically have to attempt the lever-pull indefinitely.

In Oracle of Seasons, to get to the 4th floor of Ancient Ruin, you have the same puzzle as Oracle of Ages above but with a pair of floor switches instead of levers.

...and shortly after that, you have Manhandla, whose body moves in random directions, and whose only vulnerable spots are the mouths that randomly open to shoot at you and are only vulnerable to the boomerang... the slowest weapon in the game.

If you're a completionist, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker can drive you insane with the battleship-esque minigame. It's bad enough that you have to win it once to get a heart piece, then a second time to get a treasure map. But if you want to get a second treasure map, you have to beat the game in less than 20 moves. Be prepared to run out of rupees very quickly.

If you're a speedrunner for the HD version of Wind Waker... well, suffice to say you probably aren't doing any%, as that route now requires the RNG's strongest blessings, or else you die at the very end and the entire run is wasted.

While not required to get anything useful, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has the Thrill Digger minigame, which functions just like Minesweeper... except that with a single exception, the indicators tell you two possibilities for how many traps are around. Two blue rupees next to each other could mean they share a bomb, they share a bomb but one also has one to the side, they share two bombs...

The Under a Red Moon shrine quest for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild requires you to perform an action on the shrine pedestal during a Blood Moon. Simple enough, right? Only one problem: Blood Moons occur completely at random and the player has no direct way to trigger one.note Some players have luck by killing a large number of enemies, since one purpose of the Blood Moon is to respawn slain monsters. However others see no difference whatsoever. The player's only recourse is to either go on to other things and warp to the nearest fast travel point the moment they finally see one, or to camp out at the pedestal and wait doing nothing until it finally triggers.

Laura's final quest in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia requires you to complete one of the games super-hard bonus dungeons, at the end of which the needed item MAY spawn. If you don't get an Alexandrite from the final chest, you have to run the entire bonus dungeon again...unless you exploit a ludicrous glitch to get to the chest which is mere inches from the entrance, but tantalizingly out of reach.

The freeware game La-Mulana has one in its hidden bonus dungeon the Hell Temple, success in three of the final rooms depends on both luck and high levels of skill; it could take one try or 5 hours to complete and if you mess up on any of the three you have to restart, after you defeat a couple of annoying enemies of course. Luckily, there are a few, uh, "strategies" to get through the first room without actually doing the luck parts. You're still screwed with the second one though.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has the Boost Guardian. The thing ricochets around the tiny arena it's in like a pinball. It's completely impossible to predict where it's gonna be next, and you're constantly taking damage from being in the Dark World. In addition, the health refills for the fight are located in four pillars around the room, which can only be destroyed by the boss. Beating it requires that it not hit you excessively, and that it break open the pillars when you need health refills rather than breaking them all right away and wasting the health pickups.

In order to get one of the life containers in Alundra, you need to guess the correct color in a roulette game five times in a row. To get one of the gilded falcons, you need to do this three more times. Even understanding the algorithm that the game uses to select the color (The opposite location to where the light ended up last round, plus or minus up to 2), you still only have a 40% chance of guessing right on a typical round. Fortunately, once you pull it off once, you'll have all the money you need for the trial and error needed on the later attempts.

Action Game

Pandemic 2 plays like a luck-based mission most of the time. You can play more or less perfectly, but whether you can win or not will come down to whether one or two isolated regions seal themselves off before they get infected. They usually do, and apart from trying again (and hoping you start in one of these areas) there's nothing you can do about it. The most isolated area, Madagascar, has achieved Memetic Mutation status. The Kongregate-hosted version of this game acknowledges the fact with a President of Madagascar Badge.

Averted with the Spiritual SequelPlague Inc where, while Madagascar would still close their everything if a dog so much as sneezed, you still had options to get in. One such way was with the parasite: one such evolvable trait turned it into a Puppeteer Parasite that could slam an infected plane into Madagasgar regardless of their border status.

The Top-down shooter stage from Gunstar Heroes on the Game Boy Advance can be placed in this category. The damage you take is high already, but even if you make it to the attack helicopter at the end of the section in that stage, it all boils down to whether or not the missiles, laser, and submarines fire anti-air shots hit you, and if you get hit once, the entire screen will be flooded with bullets and you'll die as your helicopter is such a large target. This makes the only possible strategy for this boss be spray and pray, hoping that you will have a little energy left for the last section of the stage.

The Russian indie game Hammerfight features the unfortunate addition of "siege bombs", which are an instant kill if they touch a character (including you), and even if they miss, they have an insanely huge blast radius and can easily take off half the players health from a half screen away. Their power is balanced out by their high price (making it Too Awesome to Use). The NPCs, however, have no such qualms about throwing one at you, especially when you are an inch from their face and cannot possibly dodge it in time. It is especially infuriating in Arena, where at higher levels you must fight a constant stream of enemies, any one of which could end your game immediately through a single suicidal siege bomb toss.

Cave Story has a corridor in the Bonus Level Of Hell where blocks, both large and small, rain down upon you dealing ten damage each completely randomly, and you have to kill or avoid small angels flying around too. It's probably safer to take five damage from the angels and use the Booster 2.0 to blast across the area while you still have Mercy Invincibility. Taken Up to 11 for those playing on Hard in the Nicalis ports (or a 3-life run in the original version); while the entire Bonus Level Of Hell becomes Harder Than Hard, the aforementioned corridor's Luck-Based Nature is fleshed out in full. All it takes is a bad combination of blocks that the player could not possibly have forseen, and boom goes the protagonist.

Broforce has a particular game mechanic where you are given a random series of characters to play a mission. Given that the characters have vastly different mobility and firepower, spawning with the wrong series can make an otherwise normal level all but unbeatable, and conversely spawning with the right one can make it possible to end the level without losing a single life. Compare Cherry Broling to Snake Broskin: Cherry moves at a hobble and has the best upwards mobility at the cost of having the worst horizontal mobility while Snake moves as fast as a regular armed bro but has a hang glider that, when figured out, acts as the cape in Super Mario World granting Snake the ability to breeze through levels if used well. In the final levels specifically against Satan's Deathfield form, Snake can easily leave it in the dust while Cherry... it's best to keep dying until you get a better bro.

Adventure Game

Particularly remarkable was a casino in Leisure Suit Larry 1, where you were actually expected by the game designers to use Save Scumming to win enough money at the casino (there is no other way to make progress in the game).

A similar situation occurs with a video poker machine in Leisure Suit Larry 5. Save Scumming is not required (if you lose your money you can hit for a little more) but definitely encouraged (the total you need to advance is very high compared to your starting amount).

One of many, many examples in a long line of evidence that Sierra personally hates you, the original EGA version of the original Space Quest has one segment where you need to turn $30 into about $240, and the only way to do it is to be really lucky with the slot machine in the bar. Aside from you being just as likely to lose money as to win, there's one special configuration which, when hit, makes the machine shoot a laser and kill you. You have to save scum to get past this part.

The VGA remake added an item picked up during the opening sequence (a magnet) that can be affixed to the slot machine that forces a jackpot enough times to meet the $240 goal and then breaks.

Because the behavior of NPCs in Addison-Wesley's The Hobbit PC game (in the 1980's) was randomly determined, the whole game could be considered a Luck-Based Mission. There's a possibility the roaming vicious warg could be captured by the wood elf long before you get to the wood elf's dungeon. And if said warg kills the only person capable of unlocking the jail door and you end up on the wrong side of that door, the game's unwinnable. Even worse, NPCs will sometimes randomly refuse to obey your orders for no good reason. Bard the bowman is the only one who can kill the dragon, but if you order him to do it and he says 'No', the dragon will kill you right away.

The lava pit in Broderbund's Mask of the Sun. At a certain point in what had previously been more or less an illustrated text adventure, the player is confronted with a pool of lava, with a stepping stone that rises and sinks into the lava rapidly. You're given a choice between jumping to the stone, and then to the other side of the pit ... or retreating back to the poison gas room you just escaped and die. But even if you choose to jump, there's still a VERY good chance you'll end up with "splash and burn" and die. The stepping stone moves so rapidly (much like rapid eye-blinking) that timing doesn't even enter into it ... it's dependent on luck. Furthermore, it became clear that it was the only way to proceed.

Similar to the King's Quest V example, Infocom (a designer which otherwise knew better) had the Crown Jewels puzzle in Zork III. In order to steal what you need from the museum, you have to wait until the guards leave. But there's a chance that a guard will randomly walk in and kill you. There's no way to hide, and there's no warning that it's going to happen. And if he kills you during this sequence, it's 'Game Over', since at this point the player is out of the Dungeon Master's reach (the Dungeon Master usually gives the player another chance when dying).

In the game's predecessor, Zork II, the game's antagonist, the Wizard of Frobozz, often randomly shows up to cast spells on the player. These spells are annoying, but harmless ... usually. The exceptions to 'usually' are what turn this into a luck-based mission, as it's possible for the Wizard to cast 'Fall' (causing you to fall) or 'Float' (causing you to float) while you're in the hot-air balloon. If he shows up at the wrong moment and casts these spells, the player will lose the hot-air balloon forever and be unable to complete the game.

Not to mention that some spells in some situations are just plain instant death, like 'Fear' when you're on a cliff or 'Fierce' when you're in the same room with the dragon, and that no matter what if the Wizard happens to cast enough spells that hold you in place for too long ('Float', 'Freeze', etc.) your lantern will run out of batteries before you have time to complete the game.

The first Zork had two Downplayed examples - fighting the troll and fighting the thief. Fighting the troll is so early in the game that a restart if you fail is a relatively minor annoyance. The thief is a Nintendo Hard brutal boss fight, but the game is designed so that you have a better chance of confronting him and winning at the end of the game.

Gold Rush!, one of the lesser-known Sierra adventures, has a few places where you can randomly catch a lethal disease, or get swept away while crossing a bridge. The death message even informs you, "there was nothing you can do; sometimes terrible things happen." And indeed, there is no way to prevent this other than to restore. Thankfully the chances of it happening are rather low.

When it does happen, though, the only recourse - as EVERY guide out there will point out - is to load a game from BEFORE you made the action that results in you leaving Brooklyn and leaving town on a different frame. Restoring from before the last action that you were healthy won't cut it [unless you catch the disease right after leaving Brooklyn].

The bomb-disarming Mastermind puzzle in The Journeyman Project. You have to solve three levels, with an extra color added each level. If you miss too many times, you go back to square one. If you take too long, the shield generator's radiation kills you.

To get to the last challenge of the Big Fish hidden object game Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst, you need to collect seven keys hidden around the mansion and take them to the cellar. The keys are easy, there's one in every room, you just need to be able to find it. The difficulty is that the game will randomly select which rooms you may go into for the keys. If none of these randomly-selected rooms are in the basement, you have no way to get to the cellar. The game auto-saves as you go along, so when you reach the end of the game after hours of playing and you can't win there's nothing to do but start over from zero and play all the way through again.

The poker section from the original Police Quest. You do badly, it's game over. Fortunately, the VGA remake makes it skippable.

Driving Game

The final mission leading to the best ending of the original Driver videogame involves driving The President across New York City while dozens of hitmen and corrupt cops in nigh-indestructible uber-fast cars try to ram your car off the road and reduce it to a wreck. Since the hitmen cars are so much faster and tougher than yours, the only way to complete the mission is if you're lucky enough that the AI cars wreck themselves as you scream across town. The mission is nearly impossible without an invincibility cheat (and you can still die by flipping over with invincibility on).

Every time-based mission requiring you to evade the cops while reaching your destination (Read: The majority) was luck-based. If a cop spawns too close to your destination, you have to detour and will run out of time.

Almost any street racing game where traffic motion is random. Particularly noticeable in the Burnout series, where a long vehicle like a bus pulls out in front of you, there's nothing you can do to prevent a crash. On time trials, this can make a track Unwinnable.

As of Burnout 3: Takedown, however, all traffic in hotlap-based races is completely scripted every time, in career at least. You can still get pretty boned in other modes, though.

Sometimes the Signature Takedowns that appeared in Takedown and Revenge are still an example of this, though. Some of the ones involving crashing opponents into static bits of the environment are easy enough: you find your landmark, you happen upon your hapless victim, you push said victim into the landmark. Bingo, the game gives you credit for the Signature Takedown. Your weapon is timing-which you don't have when you're tasked with Signatures involving crashing opponents into, say, trams or buses. Both are moving, neither are alone in traffic, and both are interspersed in obstacles. Even if you and your opponent are in the right position for a takedown, should another car or a lamp post or something get in the way and the car crashes into THAT? Regular takedown, back to square one. In Revenge, particularly, there was one involving crashing an opponent into a tram-a tram that liked moving into a little chute in between two narrow walls a lot. Finally, because their appearance isn't scripted (they're just coded so that they appear down certain roads on certain tracks, not precisely where or when) they might not show up with the main pack of cars at all.

This is a common criticism of the Mario Kart series. The Rubber Band A.I. keeps you from gaining too much of a lead in the higher difficulties, so it's all-too-common to get nailed by a bunch of non-dodgeable attacks like Lightning Bolts and Blue Shells RIGHT before the finish line and go from first to the rear of the pack out of sheer dumb luck.

One of Kirby Air Ride's objectives involves getting all 3 pieces both the Hydra AND the Dragoon in a single City Trial session. The session can only last 7 minutes max, so good luck finding a SINGLE piece of EITHER machine.

City Trial in general can consist of this since power ups and vehicles pop up randomly, so there's no guarantee that you'll find a decent assortment of power ups or one of your preferred rides.

Rad Racer, a cross country racing game on the NES, falls under this due to when and where other cars spawn and if they swerve into your lane. Touching them from the side will send your car flying sideways and into an obstacle off road, costing you time.

In Wip Eout Fusion, there is an elimination challenge where you have to destroy a large number of enemy ships on the racetrack. The tools given to every ship to fight this battle: grenades (weak), rockets (beyond weak), quakes (massive damage to EVERYONE in front of you). Weapon pads rarely provide a quake, but there are 15 ships rolling the dice so quakes will go off every few seconds, obliterating your opponents. After half a lap, the pack of 15 ships will have been reduced to about 2 or 3. Which would be nice, if you didn't have to kill 5 enemies to win this challenge. Your only chance is to get a quake from pretty much the first or second weapon pad, and happen to use it at the right moment so it finishes off 5 ships. You get no second chance.

A lot of the faster races in Ridge Racer 3D took advantage of fixing the much-maligned ancient collision mechanics of previous Ridge Racer titles, then took advantage of itway too much. Since everyone now loses very little speed when colliding with each other or not scraping walls for a very long time, even mid-game races can turn into outrageous three-or-four-machine melees wherein cars are overtaking one another, going far, far faster than they should-which you can't do in kind. This means you may keep some nitrous for yourself to break away from the pack and win a race...only to have the rubber-banding kick in and have a truck twice as tall as you zip past at what must be 300 MPH.

An interesting example in Gran Turismo. In some restricted events there can be a car far superior to the rest of the grid and your own. For example, in the World Classic Car Series (where most cars have 100-200HP) you could be driving a respectable 2000GT knowing you'll certainly win, but if you're unlucky you could find an AC 427 S/C has arrived to ruin your day.

In Gran Turismo 5, a lot of the seasonal challenges feature a single lap to a difficult track (Nurburgring Nordschleife or Suzuka are the regulars) in which you start last and have to finish first. This can become, either Unwinnable if the car starting first is a fast one or Easier Than Easy if it's a turtle, helding back all the others.

Edutainment Game

The Oregon Trail is one whole luck-based game. Characters will randomly get sick, and may even die immediately, giving little time to allow for recovery. Crossing the rivers is luck-based, too; fording a river isn't, as you shouldn't really ford a river more than three feet. Floating a wagon across carries the risk of tipping over, causing the loss of your items (and some of your people!). Even the ferry carries a very small risk — it can break loose from moorings or tip/sink. In other words, as in history, nothing is guaranteed in this game.

In Oregon Trail II, if you're unlucky enough, the wagon can tip and drown a person in as little as a foot and a half of water. You can tip even on "not too steep" hills. And hunting carries the risk of an (sometimes instantly fatal) accidental gunshot or animal attack for your leader. If he/she dies, it's game over. God help you if you get caught in a blizzard with "no progress", low/no food, few draft animals, and nothing to trade.

While frustrating, this is very much Truth In Video Gaming. A number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were drowned when Humvees flipped into shallow water. If you are underneath something extremely heavy like a wagon when it flips, you really will drown in 1 foot of water before they can get it off you.

In The ClueFinders Search and Solve Adventures, one mini-game you find early on involves Trial-and-Error Gameplay, since that is after all, the entire point of the minigame. You have to guess the rows and columns, represented by colors and shapes. (The points on the grid are colored shapes) And you have to get certain points so you can get past the game and get a reward to continue on. Problem? All it's randomized...all the spaces on the grid you have to hit could be all clustered in one corner, and the first choice you pick happens to be right on the other side, in a row and column that won't help you. You'd also be surprised how hard the 9-guess levels can be.

Let's Explore the Airport with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug got very carried away with this. It has an arcade-styled minigame called Lost Luggage, where the goal is to get each correctly colored suitcase into its matching bin. You would do this by taking control of conveyor belts and other mechanisms. The last level, Level 99, has six chutes all of the same kind, where if you put a suitcase down a chute it could come out of any of the other five in any four directions. There are several unchangeable conveyor belts that will lead it into a bin. If the wrong color lands in it, you have to restart the level. The problem is, you have no control over where it goes, and every odd is stacked against you in every possible way. Didn't think this could get worse? You have to be this lucky four times. Even worse, if you do get past it somehow, your only prize is being sent back to Level 1.

Lionel Trains Presents: Trans-Con! is an Edutainment Game dealing with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. The player has a choice of which side to start building from: Central Pacific or Union Pacific. Central Pacific has a much shorter route, however the player is required to blast through mountainous terrain with dynamite to place the tracks. Using said dynamite has a very high chance of injuring workers in the blast, and you have to make multiple blasts to cut through even one bit of terrain. It's entirely possible the player will lose all his workers (and therefore lose the game) in the first level, before even finishing one tunnel.

Odell Lake has the insects and insect larvae and the chub, if you can eat that. There is always a small chance that one of those items will conceal a hook. Fillet of mackinaw trout, anyone?

Fighting Game

In Super Smash Bros.. Brawl, getting all the trophies requires you to use trophy stands on every kind of enemy in the adventure mode, including bosses. Of course, these stands are rare, and (just like Pokémon) you have to weaken the enemy in order to catch it, so it doesn't always work. Raising the difficulty level and using certain stickers will raise the chance of getting a stand, but it's still annoying when you hit a boss too hard, kill it, and you have to go through the whole level again for another chance, not to mention if the stupid bastards hit a conveniently-spawning Koopa Shell or a Blast Box with a stray attack of their own and thus end up suiciding without you being able to do a Goddamn thing about it. Playing with a friend can greatly help: one keeps the trophy stand and keeps distractions away, while the other whittles down the boss's health.

You know what's even more luck-based though? The Trophy Lottery, in which you spend coins to possibly obtain a new trophy. Brawl does away with that annoying feature in favor of a shooter game that's just as addictive in order to get trophies and stickers. However, it is still random whether or not new trophies even show up. The Mew Trophy is an especially bad case. It's bad enough you have to fight multiple characters at once while getting worn down, but the combinations are random and can range anywhere from easy peasy to downright lethal.

And then there's the stickers in Brawl. At least with the trophies you can aim for specific ones when using the stands or in the shooting mode; with stickers, apart from a few that you get for completing challenges, you have no way of knowing which sticker you'll get each time you grab one. Thus, the only way to get them all is massive amounts of sticker grinding, and once you're near the end you could spend hours doing it and not get anything new.

Items in general make some tasks this. If a bomb spawns in front of your attack that's another multi-minute attempt at the 100-man-melee down the drain. For this reason, competitive players and tournaments often shut off items.

Gameplay itself devolves into this, with people needing to exploit the map hazards, map terrain, or item spawns in order to gain an advantage against their opponents.

Melee has a minor one that can make That One Sidequest much easier to deal with. Adventure Mode features one level patterned after The Legend of Zelda, where the player needs to find the Triforce in order to clear it. There are five potential places for it to spawn, and a Dark Link fight is positioned at the four places where it didn't spawn. Two of the locations are at places where the player can check them without triggering a possible fight (which is shown by a Master Sword in a pedestal rather than the Triforce hovering over it), with the other three situated beyond one of the first two (thus, if the Triforce is in one of those, you have to go through at least one Dark Link to get to it). The fights aren't necessarily hard, but if the Triforce is in one of the first two positions, and the player avoids the very slow Mooks in the area, they can get the Switzerland bonus, otherwise known as one of the hardest stage clear bonuses to get (all of which must be earned to get a trophy for 100% Completion). Some players will quit and restart Adventure Mode multiple times just for the chance at that bonus.

Clearing the tutorial in Soul Calibur 3 requires the player to guard impact (counter) the instructors moves while he randomly switches between high and low attacks 5 times in a row (getting hit makes you start over). The problem is that the medium attacks he uses are too quick to guard after it starts (so you need to guard before he starts) and all but a handful of characters are too slow to get out of that block and counter in time when he DOES execute a low attack, meaning the mission requires the player to be lucky enough to make a correct "prediction". To add insult to injury, the characters that ARE quick enough have this mission stupidly easy. (note:Completing the tutorial with a character unlocks their Ancient weapon. The only other way to unlock the weapon involves reaching and beating Olcadan with that character. Which means you'll fight Night Terror.)

Mortal Kombat 9 has a mode called "Test Your Luck", where a slot machine determines what additional stipulations are added to a match. These extra rules range from inconsequential (rainbow blood, Zombie Kombat) to game-changing (no arms, poisoned health, disabled super meters). These missions appear at regular intervals in the Challenge Tower, where they also determine your opponent.

Additionally, fighting Reptile in the original Mortal Kombat (and the reboot as well) not only requires a double flawless victory followed by a fatality, but the player must "Look to la Luna"; there's a random chance of seeing objects fly across the moon. The player can only challenge Reptile if the this occurs.

Although luck isn't strictly required to win the fights against Shao Kahn or Kintaro it certainly helps. Both have tremendously powerful and versatile movesets that can allow them to hit you for massive damage from all the way across the arena with very limited ability to dodge or block. They both also have a tendency to stop and taunt in the middle of combat. If you're lucky they'll stand around taunting like idiots the whole battle, allowing you to slowly chip away at their health bar with ranged attacks. If you're unlucky they'll charge in immediately and spam their most powerful moves at lightning speed until you die.

Dissidia: Final Fantasy has some of these, mostly relating to the Battlegen system. Crash course: Battlegen produces unique items for synthing weapons/armor/accessories based on what the player does in battle, the "standard" set of 'gens are five items made in four ways: inflicting Bravery Break, landing an HP attack, using an Exburst, and damaging the stage/slamming the opponent into the wall, ground, or ceiling. However, battlegen is never guaranteed—you only ever have a chance of generating the item when performing the above actions. That's the luck-based, here's the mission: In campaign mode, there are enemies who demand, if the player wants the highest score possible, that the player cause battlegen to occur within ten seconds of starting the match. Not even factoring in the Spiteful A.I. who seems to know the player's motivations and will run away instead of fight and give you a chance—the player can still do everything "right" and just be out of luck. If you're going for 100% Completion, time to restart that board!

Much like the above example, there's an achievement for battlegen-ing five items in one match—and you can only ever generate one of each individual item per match. Thank God for the Stiltzkin opponents and their unusually long list of possible battlegen items, as they turn this achievement from "nigh impossible" to merely "hugely aggravating."

The sequel makes battlegening a lot less frustrating: getting generic opponent-based items is a lot easier and there's only 3 of them per character, you don't need to battlegen the more common items first to be able to get the rarer ones and there's no DP anymore, meaning nothing requires you to succeed in a battlegen within a time limit.

If the player is deep in the Lunar Whale or Blackjack course, that is to say, running gauntlets of random enemies 20 to 50 levels above the level cap, the player's survival can quickly wind up luck-based: Did the computer give the opponent the best equipment in the game, or merely a motley assortment? Do they have accessories that complement their strengths, or worthless ones? Is their summon godly, or horrible? Is their CPU-behavior set to a playstyle the player can counter reliably? There's no way of knowing unless you fully commit yourself to fighting the opponent. Start praying.

The fight with Jinpachi in Tekken 5 comes down to this. Jinpachi has an attack that comes out almost too fast to block, interrupts any attack you perform, stuns you, and forces you to stand. He also has a fireball that takes off massive amounts of your health and which he can use multiple times in a row. The only way the player can win the fight, short of spamming Forward-Forward+Square, is if Jinpachi's AI decides not to use the "stun palm" - if it does, it will always chain the stun into waves of fireballs and wipe the player out.

Some of the Parallel Quests in Dragon Ball Xenoverse are like this, mostly the ones where you fight Super Saiyans. Super Saiyans have unlimited Ki so they can spam Ultimate Attacks, during which they're mostly invincible; for players this is balanced by making Super Saiyan a temporary transformation, but computer opponents often have it as a permanent status, so the fight becomes a question of "will the computer decide to let me damage it, or will it stunlock me with nonstop Kamehamehas?"

Not to mention that attempting to get a specific clothing item or skill causes the randomness to stick out extra hard. For the best chance at items and skills dropping, you must complete optional tasks in order to get an Ultimate Finish. Trouble is, in addition to the item/skill drops being random once the quest is finished, it's totally random whether the optional tasks will even present themselves to you in order to get an Ultimate Finish! For example: In order to unlock the ability to turn Super Saiyan, you have to fight Piccollo, then Gohan, then Vegeta, and then Krillin and Goku will show up. If you defeat Krillin first, Goku has a CHANCE to turn Super Saiyan, and then if you defeat Super Saiyan Goku, you have a CHANCE of the Super Saiyan skill dropping. If you defeat Krillin first and Goku doesn't change, tough luck! Start the mission over and fight through everyone again.

Obtaining all the skill cards in Sonic Battle is this. Emerl the customizable robot gets a random skill after each fight, which may be a duplicate of one you already had since skill cards can be traded between players. Early on, this does give you enough new skills to replace some of the near-useless default skills, but later on you'll mostly get duplicates. The skills usually are copied from whoever was just fought, but if he gets a "rare" skill, it may have nothing to do with who you were fighting, and may have nothing to do with fighting at all. It's possible to fight against Amy and Cream only to unlock parts of Shadow's color scheme, which you will likely never use unless you like spending your skill points on turning a fighting robot into a color-basedVirtual Paper Doll.

Team modes (i.e. Team Deathmatch or Capture The Flag) in online multiplayer can become this. You can be a pro at the game, but if you're unlucky enough to be paired up with bad teammates, you can still lose the match.

Unlocking the Invincible cheat requires finishing the second level, Facility, within 125 seconds. Being able to do this is largely dependent on where Dr. Doak (with whom you must speak in order to finish the level) randomly spawns. This is not a question of looking in the right place. Only one specific place renders it possible to finish the level in time.

Not to mention the Statue level. While nowhere near as difficult as the above, if the player looked in the wrong place for the randomly generated flight recorder, he would run out of time to unlock the cheat.

In Perfect Dark, obtaining the dual CMP-150's on the second level requires you to reach the weapons cache computer without being detected, which heavily depends on the positioning and behavior of the guards. On Perfect Agent, this is close to impossible due to the AI's keen senses.

Witches are randomly placed (if at all) each time a level begins (which means two times per map in Versus Mode). There is an achievement for successfully clearing an entire campaign without disturbing ANY witches. Guess how frequently witches are placed on choke points where hugging the wall (or worse, ledge) still gets you too close to the witch to avoid alerting her?

Even worse if you are playing single player mode. You can go through the entire game avoiding witches. If a witch spawns in a finale, an NPC team member WILL disturb the witch without fail.

Sometimes a witch will be placed at the top of a ladder that you must go up in order to continue the game, and she is placed in a spot where it is pretty much impossible to shoot or see her until you get to the top of that ladder, then it only takes half a second for her to get angry and rip your face off. This is especially horrible in one player mode when you are basically forced to sacrifice yourself just to continue.

And then there's the items like first aid kits or special ammo. Usually, if the team is doing well, you will usually just find molotovs or pipe bombs off the beaten path, but if the survivors are crippled and have nothing to heal with, the AI Director MAY spawn more health kits or other healing items, which can sometimes make or break the game.

The entire game itself can be a luck based mission at times no matter how careful your team is. Sometimes you can go an entire game without any incaps/deaths/restarts and other times you may have to restart several times due to being overwhelmed by the infected. Especially evident if you're playing with bots on any difficulty above Normal. Bots will always heal to 80% hp before leaving the saferoom. However this means by the last saferoom, you could be walking out with one or no extra medkits at all. Good luck surviving the Finale, as the bots will almost always get incapped or killed before the second tank, leaving you alone hoping that a smoker or hunter doesn't come out and ruin your day.

The bots themselves can also make or break the game. Either they will quickly save you if you get in trouble or they will watch you die before deciding to do anything. Especially fun when the player is grabbed by a Smoker or Hunter, and the bot is melee hitting the normal zombies around them instead of the actual threat.

The Sacrifice campaign for the first game is like this during the finale where you have to jump off the bridge and kick start the generator. If a Smoker grabs you while he is on a rooftop, the bots won't shoot the tongue or bother to snipe the Smoker, so you'll die and have to restart, thus you have to hope a Smoker doesn't spawn when it's time to do the sacrifice act. This is somewhat avoided in the sequel in the same campaign due to having more weapons and items to defend yourself with and having more special infected types so your chances of a Smoker grabbing you is lower.

Many levels in the Halo series on Legendary difficulty are luck based missions due to the randomization of enemy spawns and random unavoidable death situations. Well, that's why you've got plenty of save points.

In Halo 2 Legendary, the odds are dramatically stacked against you, and even if you play very well, you're still fairly likely to die. So you just do any given hard segment over and over again, doing pretty much the exact same thing each time, until the one time when all the chips fall just so, and you make it through. It's certainly not skill-based: if you use an optimal strategy and execute it flawlessly each time, you'll still die ten times and succeed once.

Jackal Snipers, with their one hit kills and near-perfect accuracy on Legendary, often create luck based situations, particularly where they spawn randomly.

Something even more sinister can happen if your luck is really bad. All of the Halo games after the first will try to detect if your last checkpoint landed you in an Unwinnable situation. If it detects this (say, you die two seconds after spawning several times in a row), it will send you back a checkpoint. However, it isn't unusual to be insta-killed very easily due to reasons listed above, and if it happens enough times, you'll actually lose some of your progress.

Halo 5: Guardians has the Warzone Firefight gametype, in which player success is largely determined by whether or not the bosses spawned are unreachable or Nigh Invulnerablebullet sponges, or whether or not your objective is defense of an objective across the map or protection of a highly-exposed relic.

The final battle in Killzone 2 has elements of this; the final boss has a teleporting ability that lets him constantly Flash Step all around you. It does make a lot of noise and give off an easy-to-detect blue light, but he moves very fast when he decides to attack and absolutely LOVES to teleport BEHIND you or directly in your path if you try to run. There's simply no telling if he'll suddenly materialize three inches from your back or if you'll run smack into him and (in either case) end up being gutted by his knife of doom.

Heck, just put in the whole of the battle leading up to that fight; the player is attacked by what amounts to a battalion of elite soldiers, numbering up to at least 40 vs 2. Your partner is stupid. And the Helghast have the smarts to flank you from almost every direction with not only machine guns, but also flamethrowers and rocket launchers...just try to survive all that in one go on Elite difficulty, if at all.

A number of combat-oriented shooter missions - such as in Men of Valor and Call of Duty (or thereabouts) - where you have to run through an artillery barrage to a foxhole or somewhere to get to the next stage, and it's up to chance whether you go down or not while running. Such as the second half of "Heat" in Modern Warfare, where you go from holding the line to running back through it.

In H.P. Lovecraft-based FPS Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the fourth mission has the player riding in the back of a pickup truck while the driver navigates the streets of Innsmouth. As firearms are extremely inaccurate (and you're shooting at things that don't take that much damage from them), there's very little point in shooting back, and if the game decides that the swarms of inhuman monsters taking potshots at you are accurate enough to overwhelm your first aid supplies, you're going to be doing the level over. And over and over and over...

The first three PC Rainbow Six games can be a crapshoot with the semi-random positioning and movement of the tangoes, espcially on Elite difficulty, where they often headshot you as soon as you poke your head around a corner (sometimes even on the "normal" difficulty setting), and during stealth based missions where you have to avoid being detected. Cases in point: in Rogue Spear's Arctic Flare mission, if the two tangos outside the control room are facing towards the stairs as you come up them, they WILL alert the bridge guards, resulting in the ship being blown up or hostages being killed. Often, they seem to already know you're coming. On "Perfect Sword", sometimes the tangos will come downstairs after the sniper fires, sometimes they won't. If they stay holed up upstairs, you're more or less fucked, as its nearly impossible to clear the room without a hostage being killed.

On Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's Hard (read Harder Than Hard) difficulty setting, many levels are practically impossible to pass without Save Scumming, particularly where there are randomly Respawning Enemies, and with the computer being a cheating bastard. For example, Omaha Beach, where even if you flawlessly dodge the machine guns, you'll still get randomly killed by artillery shells. And Sniper Town, with its randomly-placed hitscan snipers. Earning some of the medals is also luck based, particularly the Sniper's Last Stand and Storming Fort Schmerzen levels, where a certain number of Red Shirt comrades must survive.

The exact same applies to the missions in Call of Duty where you have to outrun artillery.

Same for most COD games on Veteran difficulty, with the random enemy spawning, near-instant death shots with pinpoint accuracy, and grenade spamming. Especially the original, which lacked regenerating health, and removed all medkits on Veteran.

The first boss of Descent, between the boss's random teleport spams and Macross missile massacres, and the population of enemies (Super Hulks and Class 1 Drillers) in its lair. Especially if you're trying to save the hostages on Insane skill. In fact, many of the levels are this on Insane due to the random roaming nature of many enemies.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior features an escape sequence in which you must swim across a lake while being shot at by at least 3 enemies with near-perfect accuracy and no way to fire back at them. Surviving the segment boils down to winning enough of their accuracy coin-flips to reach the other side. Did I mention you can't dive under the water? This is one of many escape scenes you WILL be shot repeatedly during but it stands out for offering absolutely no way to retaliate.

Receiver has two sources of this: the level is generated randomly, and your starting loadout is generated randomly. Given that there is no Emergency Weapon, therefore, starting with exactly one bullet is a major handicap.

PAYDAY: The Heist can be either smooth sailing or a nightmare to trudge through thanks to the special units of the SWAT teams. Tasers will use said weapon to shock you to death, which freezes you in place and makes you fire your gun uncontrollably. Shields will use said shield to flank you and require to be hit from behind. Cloakers can instantly down you. Bulldozers have high firepower and can only be shot in the face. There has been many cases where a single cloaker wiped out all four players and bulldozers plowed through even the most hardened players. And you can get multiples of the same special units coming after you.

Any level that requires you to use a saw, drill, or hacking device. The items will jam or stall at some point, but how many times they stall is random.

Several levels are mostly or purely luck based:

Diamond Heist forces stealth upon you if you want to get to the diamonds without trouble. If a guard spots you before then, you're forced to install the hacking devices on the alarm boxes and make sure they don't jam as the SWAT team come rushing in. Even if you get to the vault without being discovered, it's randomized on whether or not the codes work. If the codes work, great. If not, you're then forced to find the CFO (and your cover is blown by then), take him to the roof and have Bain pick him up for some negotiations. The CFO himself is also luck based on whether or not he gives up the code. If he does, then you can get to the vault. If he refuses to give up the codes, then Bain kicks him out of the helicopter to his death and you will have to find another person who can give the code. You will get the diamonds no matter what, but how you get them depends on whether or not the game wants you to succeed.

No Mercy also has a ton of randomization in nearly all of its objectives. In the first part, you have to destroy several cameras, but they are in random locations and the more players there are in the game, the more cameras you will have to destroy and you only have 7 seconds to destroy them either way. Once you do, you then have to keep the civilians down and make sure they don't run off to trigger the alarm and yes, where some of them are located are also randomized. When you are going through the computer and then searching for a specific file, you may get some events where someone may come up to the hot zone, to which you will have to yell at them to stay down, or if they are a guard, kill them.

Should the alarm go off in the No Mercy level, the ICU gets sealed and you have to hack it away with a saw, and then use the saw again on one of the 3 isolation booths and hope the first one you picked has the patient you are looking for. On top of this, even when you get the blood samples, you have to get them validated and it's randomized on whether or not they will be successfully validated. Even worse, when you call the elevator, how many times the cops cut the power is random.

Many of events in Modern Warfare on Veteran depend on luck to some extent to overcome, but Mile High Club is above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak, with the combination of a one-minute time limit, cramped quarters combined with swarms of tangoes, unpredictable enemy behavior, Artificial Stupidity by your teammates, and the tendency for enemies to No-Sell your flashbangs half the time.

Even on Regular difficulty, there are still a few sections of the games where your survival depends more on how accurate the enemy's shots are rather than any skill on your part - "Bag and Drag" from the third game in particular, where you're in a car chase and as such have no option to hide from the barrage of enemy bullets being fired at you. Dying seconds after moving to the back of the van for the first half without being able to do a thing about it is extremely common.

The Car Ride stage in the first Call of Duty had similar fake difficulty.

RAGE gives the achievement "JACKPOT!" for rolling four kills on your first roll in the Tombstones Mini-Game. Yeah, an achievement for getting a particular result on a dice roll. The odds are 16:1 against on the face of it, and that's assuming id Software didn't weight particular rolls. Likewise the achievements for completing the other minigames (e.g. an in-universe trading card game).

Several Borderlands 2 Badass Rank Challenges and achievements depend on luck. For instance, the "Jackpot!" challenge requires playing the slot machines in Sanctuary until you win either a big pile of Eridium bars or an ultra-rare weapon. Statistically, you have a roughly .25% (about one in 404) chance of either of these spins coming up. Another achievement requires a natural 20 or a natural 1 during looting in Tiny Tina's RPG session, but at least that one's less frustrating than the slot machine challenge, in that you're not obligated to spend anything.

Weapon generation in the Borderlands series can also fall into this territory. After a long enough time just about any weapon will fall behind in terms of damage and if there's something unique about a gun that you really like, ammo regen or a special effect, then you better hope that you find a similar gun with enough power to make it viable.

Light Gun Game

GHOST Squad's third mission has a prompt where you must pick from one of three cottages in hopes of finding McCoy, who has been kidnapped by the terrorists. One cottage holds him and will end the segment without further resistance, one cottage has a few enemies to shoot and a hostage that you shouldn't shoot, and one cottage has a Hand-to-Hand Combat scene worth a substantial amount of points. Which cottage holds which is randomized on every playthrough and the only hint you get is that the cottage with white smoke holds McCoy; if you want the most points out of this segment you still have only a 50% chance of getting that chance.

Miscellaneous Games

Action 52 is notorious for its enemies spawning in random places and shooting at random times.

Especially Micro Mike where sometimes a screen will be flooded with so much enemies that slowdown and death is unavoidable. There's also a small round bullet type of enemy which spawns randomly at random part of the screen, sometimes appearing behind you, making a hit unavoidable. It's even worse, given the Action 52 collision detection. Chances of even completing the first level is about 1/50 while the rest is up to skill.

Bad enemy combination can result an almost instant game over in Hambo.

The fan remake of Streets of Rage has this for the final level if you defeat Robo X. You have 3 minutes to disarm a bomb in the building or ignore it and try to escape and beat Shiva before the bomb explodes. To disarm the bomb, you have to find a room with a computer console which you can destroy to disarm the bomb. To get to the bottom floor, which is your escape route, you have to find a key card. The 3rd and 2nd floors each have 3 rooms. 4 of them are trap rooms filled with mooks and electrical traps. The other 2 contain the computer console and a treasure room filled with money, health items, and the key card. However, don't be fooled into thinking that once you know where the rooms are that you can go to them every time you play this level. The game randomizes what rooms will have the key card and computer every time you play this level. Oh, and don't forget you only have 3 minutes to actually figure this out before you're blown to bits and get the Bad Ending.

The iOS game Lego Minifigures is a game where you need to match up a minifigure's head, legs, and torso. The problem? All of it is luck-based. It plays exactly like a slot machine, and the only way to add a minifigure to your collection is to hope that it will somehow get it right. If not, you have to keep spinning.

The Find Mii minigame on the StreetPass Mii Plaza. Each Mii you find or hire with play coins has a different spell depending on what color of shirt they wear. The 12th room of the tower is completely dark and the only way to progress is to have a hero with a white shirt so he can use his spell to light the room, all other heroes just leave when they see the darkness. Meaning you'll have to wait until you come across someone with a white Mii or until the game gets generous enough to give you one when you're hiring. Oh, and all other heroes before the white one will be lost. Thankfully, you only need to light the room once.

This has been somewhat averted in Find Mii II, since now you can re-hire people you've tagged with Street Pass. You still need to have found Miis of the color required in order to do it, but once you have at least one, it becomes a lot easier (especially since the new obstacle rooms may now require 2 Miis instead of one).

The web-browser game PokéHeroes has the Game Corner, and the game unlocked at Level 7 is the Concentration Game. However, besides Game Chips, there is a particular kind of prize to get: the Retro Eggs consisting of Chikorita, Cyndaquil, Totodile, Hoothoot and Sentret. Simple enough, but there is a catch: the chances of even obtaining a Retro Egg is very low, with the chances increasing if you make less wrong flips. However, since the game is random, you better hope that after you are done matching all of the pairs that you get the Retro Egg. But, another catch is that if you do not have a empty space, then it is back to the matching pairs in hopes of getting the Retro Egg.

There is also the Lugia Egg Voucher and the Lake Trio Egg Vouchers. Getting the Lugia Egg Voucher is hard enough, considering that getting 4 Pokémon to match the result gets you the voucher (or a shiny one, for all 5) but the Lake Trio Egg Vouchers are just extremely hard. You need to waste 100 Gold Game Chips on the Legend mode and hope that you will get three 7's, or you will be back to interacting with Pokémon and Pokémon Eggs to try again.

Racing missions in Lego Marvel Superheroes. You're racing in New York City with randomly generated NPC vehicles of varying sizes and speeds. You can lose, even if your vehicle is fast and you don't go off-course, if there's a giant bus in front of you.

This behavior, though, can work in your favor, as you can simply find a bus on your own before starting the race and place it in front of your opponent, and he won't be able to move at all (it doesn't even have to be a bus, you can use much any other vehicle if you set it on its side, so its wheels can't be used to push it forward), as the AI is not capable of reverse maneuvers.

Many Hugo the TV Troll games have a final stage where Hugo has to choose the correct key to open a treasure chest or pull the correct rope to lift a cage which his family is trapped in. There's no indication of which is the correct one and if you choose the wrong one it's game over.

There are several World of Warcraft raid bosses that are luck based. Kel'Thuzad in 25-man mode Naxxramas will periodically Mind Control two raid members at a time, and frequently picks healers. Other examples are bosses that require strategic movement but rather then using a timer to time their abilities, have a cooldown, and free choice whether to use an ability or not. The most annoying aspect of this is Akil'zon in Zul'aman, where you must collapse to avoid his Electric Storm, but often, he will instead use several Static Discharges, annihilating your group.

A better example might be the Valentine's Day "Be Mine!" achievement, which required you to create eight candies from an item that generated one at random ten times. The random number generator was fickle that week.

Holiday achievements in general can be these sometimes, especially the infamously aggravating Hallow's End holiday, which requires no less than three achievements that are completely reliant on the RNG to gain progress towards (Getting toothpicks, getting enough tricky treats to eat yourself sick, and getting an impossibly rare drop of both a pumpkin vine companion pet and a jack-o-lantern helmet.)

The "How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies" quest in the Death Knight area requires the player to extract information from Scarlet Crusaders. This is done by equipping a pair of pokers and attacking the mobs, with a chance on a hit that they'll talk. The enemy talking is so completely random that the quest can take anywhere from a few seconds to over an hour.

WoW's end-game consists of your raid doing one dungeon or group of dungeons until you gear up enough to do the next higher difficulty. Early on, the gear was class-specific and dropped completely randomly from bosses, meaning you could have Molten Core on farm but still not be able to move on because you keep getting hunter gear and your tank just can't get that helmet he needs. This has been improved since then, with gear/class homogenization making you more likely to be able to use a drop and tier sets being bought with looted tokens that can be used by multiple classes.

One of the best and still most relevant examples of luck in WoW are mount drops. Certain raid or dungeon bosses have a very small chance to drop a rare mount, the odds of you winning the mount are even less than that due to there usually being anywhere between 4 - 24 other people who can all lay claim to it. The most (in?)famous example being the Rivendare Deathcharger, it used to have a 0.1% chance of dropping (now has a 1% chance) and guilds were known to have split up over who got to have it. Right now it is solo-farmable, but people still often kill him several hundred times and get nothing. Honorable mention being the Ashes of Al'ar, which still has a 0.1% drop from a boss that can only be defeated once per week (and still requiring at least some teammates) as opposed to Rivendare who could be fought several times per hour.

Some of the daily quests are based on random drops, particularly the fishing dailies in which players must catch a certain type of fish that can only be caught on the quest. In the Icecrown daily Slaves of Saronite, the player must talk to and free slaves, who will either 1)run to freedom, 2)commit suicide or 3)attack you. Only the first counts toward your total.

Halfus Wyrmbreaker was this in the early stages of Cataclysm, depending on your raid configuration. He would have a random set of three out of five drakes each week, which would influence what abilities he would use, and would have to be released and killed to weaken his abilities and put a damage increasing debuff on him. General consensus is that the Slate Dragon (who gives him the abilty to inflict a healing debuff) and the Storm Rider (which gives him the ability to launch a powerful AOE that is cast too quickly to be interrupted until the Storm Rider is released) gave him the most deadly abilites out of the five, and the presence of either would make winning nearly impossible for a group just starting Cataclysm raiding.

Lord Rhyolith cranks this Up to 11. Success on this boss is entirely dependant on where he chooses to spawn and then ignite volcanos that he must then be guided to break by stepping on. These volcanos apply a constantly stacking debuff that increases the raid's fire damage taken. Basically, he can spawn and activate a volcano right in front of him and then step on it causing minimal damage or he will spawn it on the other side of the map which he won't get to any time soon as he moves very slowly. This sheer luck based fight earned the ire of many players who considered him harder than Ragnaros (the final boss of this raid) depending on how lucky they were. It also earned him the nickname Lord Random. Since his release he was toned down various times and is now more managable, but can still wipe a raid with an ill-placed volcano or two.

The sandstone drake alchemy mount had three levels of RNG smeared on it. First, you had to get an archaeology dig site in Uldum. Then you had to get the Canopic Jar as your item to solve. If you didn't get that, you waste a bunch of fragments and start over. And then, if you do get the canopic jar, it has a tiny chance of containing the alchemy recipe. Some people got it the first day of the expansion it was added in... and some still haven't gotten it, years later.

MUD II, descendant of the very first MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) requires the player to touch the touchstone in order to obtain the ability to use spells. Failure means instant death, with the chance of success being a function of the player's level. Since the use of magic becomes almost essential in later levels, most players touch it with an approximately one-in-six chance of dying, having spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time grinding to that level.

EVE Online: Apocrypha introduces reverse-engineering which is doubly luck-based. You have approximately 30% chance of a successful job, then a 25% chance of that job producing the desired result. That's right, a net 7.5% chance of getting the desired result.

Kingdom of Loathing is full of Fetch Quests that require you to obtain randomly-dropping items. Sometimes you can plan things so you're levelling up decently while searching for that elusive item, but sometimes you'll find yourself looking for it in an area several levels below where you "should" be.

Also parodied with one subquest which consists entirely of "press a button until you roll an 11 on 2d6. If you roll anything else, you take damage". Of course, a 10-leaf clover, which has already been introduced by that point as an item granting the player luck for an adventure, will make you always roll an 11. (Except in one mode where clovers aren't available - so loaded dice are substituted.)

However, if you're in Hardcore and want to go to Bad Moon, you must not use 10-leaf clovers. Including the above. What used to be harmless is now not so harmless.

There have been multiple incarnations of delay features implemented; completely divorced from the whims of the RNG, you won't find the thing you're looking for for a certain number of adventures in the appropriate area after you've been told to find it. Of course, once you've expended those adventures, you still have the RNG to contend with, and it is a fickle beast indeed. The delay system has met with varying levels of outrage, so the devs rigged the formula for determining the delay so that it's always "5" until they can come up with a better solution.

The RNG got so famous/infamous that it became a character. It sometimes applies "blessings" or "curses" to players for being polite or rude to it, though these effects don't actually do anything. Probably.

To get the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy, all you have to do is pick it up during the Strange Leaflet Quest. Problem is, it isn't always there. There's 4 other items that can appear in its place, all of which are useless note Well, they provide a clue to a hidden sidequest within said Quest, one which is unavailable if the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy is there. If the trophy isn't there, you have to play through the entire game again, which takes a few days at the very least, for another 1-in-5 shot at getting it.

Back around Christmas 2011 a Steam promotion for Champions Online involved a gathering mission. The basic idea was that players had to get through the tutorial mission and then go around the main HUB finding Christmas gifts in typical packaging, and take the items from said packages after taking 5 seconds to open them. The main problem was that straying too far from the hub would probably get you killed instantly by mooks at a higher level than you. Most of the gifts appeared in areas right next to combat zones, so coming down in an area with a gift and waiting for it to be picked up would probably get you slaughtered before you could retrieve the quest items. Add to the fact that gifts may not contain the required item 100% of the time, and also add to the fact that other players would be going around looking for the gifts too, and ALSO add that you might be attacked from one of these crates as well, made this a slog that could take well over 3 hours to finish.

In one high level RuneScape quest, you confront The Dragon with a companion, who enrages said Dragon and gets attacked. The luck comes in when you realize your companion has fairly low HP, and can easily get trashed by the boss in a few good hits. Since you can't give your companion food, it all comes down to whether or not you'll whittle the boss' health down before he kills your companion.

Dungeoneering achievement "And I Want It Now" requires you to finish a Complexity 6 dungeon (that is, find and defeat the boss) alone in 6 minutes. Dungeons are randomly generated, so you literally have to cross your fingers and hope for a simple floorplan.

The crafting in Final Fantasy XI is entirely based on equations depending on your level in a particular craft, the level of the recipe you're trying to make, and luck. And there is a cap on your success rate below 100%. So your level 110+3 Cook could catastrophically fail to boil a carrot, though the chance is very slim. Whether or not you "HQ'ed" a synth was also dependent on certain factors plugged and a random number generator.

Final Fantasy XIV crafting is slightly different. You essentially have a progress bar and an quality bar. When the progress bar is filled, the synthesis is successfully completed, and if the quality bar is filled, it's a 100% high quality chance. If the quality bar is less than full, you get a certain percentage chance for an HQ result based on how full the bar is. However, the abilities you use to fill these bars, particularly the ones used to fill the quality bar, have a chance of failing. Gear and actually ability has no effect on the failure rate of these abilities. So it's still mathematically possible (though if you're smart with your abilities, it's less than .0001%) for a capped crafter to botch a level 2 synth. It doesn't help that players swear that 98% chance of HQ synths result in NQs more often than 2% chance of HQs actually HQ.

Worse in FFXIV is Atma Farming. You need 12 Atma as to upgrade a relic weapon past a certain point. These Atma drop from completing Full Active Time Events (FAT Es), which are little scenario battles that pop up in the overworld. The Atma dropping is entirely luck based, and your luck is going to absolutely suck. It's entirely common to spend 5 hours FATE grinding to not get a damn thing. Not helping the "I'm Not Having Fun" factor is the fact that FATE grinding is widely believed to be the most sole crushingly tedious thing in the game. Also, you have to do this for every relic weapon you want upgraded, and every job has their own relic weapon.

While Atma farming is still entirely RNG based, SE has patched it so the drop rate is much higher, turning potentially many weeks of farming into a few days of it. Bad news is that they added a step to the relic weapon upgrade process that was even worse than the original Atma grind. To upgrade one's relic to a Zodiac Weapon, one must collect an item from each of 16 dungeons, among a pile of other crap that is just bought with some form of in-game currency or another. The items that drop from dungeons are charitably assumed to have a drop rate of 15%, and it takes at least 10 minutes to do even the fastest dungeon involved, at least 30 minutes for Aurum Vale and Dzemael Darkhold. The math ends painfully. Naturally, you have to do this for 'every' Zodiac Weapon you want.

Guild Wars has a particularly frustrating example. During the Divinity Coast mission, the bonus objective is to find five villagers throughout the countryside and take them with you. If all five reach the end safely, you're rewarded. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Sometimes, one (or several) of the villagers will spawn in the middle of a group enemies, typically dying long before you can get anywhere near them. It's entirely possible to fail the bonus objective and have to restart the entire mission, simply because the game didn't feel like playing fair. A luck-based mission, indeed.

Party Game

Mario Party is one, big Luck Based GAME, justified since it's a digital board game and most of the physical of them have a luck factor, and the game is designed to be mindless fun with your friends and not something competitive.

Beginning with Mario Party 2, there are several minigames that are mechanically identical to Russian Roulette with four players, just with family friendly themes like "Stacked Deck" (twelve cards on the table, three are hiding Bowser symbols) or "Pier Pressure" (ten fishing rods, three have hooked sea urchins).

Two LPers of the game - in their third round - came up with a hidden block on the first turn. Containing a star. It went downhill from there.

The Runaway Guys had what is arguably the biggest stroke of luck in regards to hidden stars ever recorded: Chuggaaconroy has found 2, NintendoCapriSun has found 1, and ProtonJon found THREE STARS IN ONE 20-TURN GAME. He only needed to buy ONE star in the entire game, at which point he ended up with SIX.

Watchthisgamehere. Rawrzaur wins the ENTIRE game without EVER buying a star himself. He won through nothing but sheer dumb luck, and the reactions of his friends who were playing alongside him are as would be expected.

Get a Rope from Mario Party 5 is the literal version of luck based mission. Pull a rope, hope you get the better result than the opponent. Completely luck based; you don't even have to press a button.

And, of course, there's the board games themselves. Then again, board games in real life are oftentimes Luck Based Missions.

Really, some people think that the reason the Mario Party series began to decline is because more and more of the minigames became luck based.

At the end of Mario Party 9's solo mode, it's you, an AI partner that hates you, and two smarter than your partner AIs that, if they win, make you start the level ALL over! The kicker, the Boss minigames(the ones with the most mini-star value) are pure dice rolling.(okay, the Bowser requires dodging but still,) Expect Shyguy and Magikoopa to have improbable luck and win both of these while your "partner" ruins your chances of winning by getting you fourth and then getting third itself.

It's debatable if skill can be used, but Mario Party 1 and Mario Party 2's Chance Times can change who wins in one turn because one of the outcomes is swapping stars. Did you happen to choose who was in first and who was in fourth? Sucks to be that guy.

Special mention goes to the Bowser's Big Blast minigame in the second game which is pretty much the Mario Party equivalent of Russian Roulette.

Family Game Night 3 featured video game versions of various Hasbro games, one of which was Mouse Trap. ANY achievement related to Mouse Trap was innately luck-based as Mouse Trap is simply rolling dice until someone wins.

In addition, the game featured a Yahtzee-like card game which is basically making poker hands until someone wins. While this game allowed for SOME strategy, the achievement for making 6 hands in a single game is essentially luck based as all you can do is HOPE you are dealt better cards than your opponents.

The achievements for winning Spin-To-Win (in the Game of Life) and pulling over another player for speeding (rolling a 10) are innately luck-based as well.

One of the Wii games has a minigame that quite literally amounts to "Russian Roulette with catapults".

Platform Game

The last encore level of BattleBlock Theater is made almost entirely of exploding platforms. There are tons of cannons firing down at you at all times & their shots move fast enough to come on screen during a jump & kill you during that same jump. Dodging a projectile usually requires you to stop or jump at which point you usually either get hit by a line of projectiles from out of nowhere or fall in acid because the platform under you exploded. The timing of the shots is randomized to some degree too.

There's a DK Coin in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, towards the end of the level "Web Woods" that's at the end of the target barrel cycle (only in the SNES and GBA versions; the GB version, Donkey Kong Land 2, has this coin elsewhere). The catch? It's only there for one micro-second. If you are even a frame late, you won't get the coin. Oh, and the level is quite long. "Mudhole Marsh" in the fourth world has a similar situation, but you have a bit more time before it goes to the next item.

The game Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle for Sega Genesis takes place on Planet Paperrock. Accordingly, the player has to play Rock, Paper, Scissors to gamble for power up items, at a highly increasing cost over the course of the game. Each boss fight is a series of Rock, Paper, Scissors matches.

Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom also revolves boss fights with Rock, Paper, Scissors, but goes a step beyond. If you win a round, your opponent's head starts spinning and for the round to count you have to guess which way they'll be looking when you press the D-pad. They had to do the same thing if they won a round, but still...

There was at least one case where they dropped you a hint: a character tells you that another character in the game "hates scissors," meaning that he'll always choose Paper in the first part. Though you still have to randomly guess which direction he'll look in the second part.

In Mega Man X5, there are two ways to prevent the space colony Eurasia from crashing into the Earth, but their odds of success can only be manipulated to a point. The laser will almost never succeed no matter what you do, and the space shuttle will sometimes fail even if you gathered all its parts. You can also affect it with who you've been playing as for most of the game, someone who uses Zero a lot has a better chance of him not succumbing to the virus, as the game won't remove him due to how frequently he's used.

An already Nintendo Hard freeware game by the name of Dungeon (download link) is this taken to its logical extreme. Depending on your computer's name, your username, your RAM, and your hard drive (and maybe even your Operating System), the game picks a bug to inflict on you. This can range from merely changing level names around to making the game completely unwinnable due to fast enemies or spikes being one pixel taller. "Bugless" version is here

The first special stage of Kaizo Mario World requires the player to perform a leap of faith over (essentially) a Bottomless Pit and hope that a fish jumps up at the right place for them to bounce off and continue. There is no set pattern to how the fish appear at all, meaning the jump comes down to pure luck. As Wugga said during his Let's Play of the level:

"How is this good gaming design?"

The emerald/key hunting missions in both games of the Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 can come down to this, especially in the latter title. The worst case is Security Hall. In any other hunting levels, if you take too long, you just don't get as good a rank, at least on the first mission. Here, if you take too long, you lose a life. The fourth mission imposes a time limit with the same penalty on all stages, making the hunting stages a definite example of this. At least the fourth missions are optional with regard to finishing the stories, but you still have to beat at least one hunting stage with a time limit in order to progress.

Ironically this is averted for the 5th Hard Mode missions which makes them cake walks. In line with being harder, the emeralds are kept in very hard to find and difficult to reach locations... however said locations are always the same, so you could easily take a huge amount of time to complete with an abysmal rank your first time, then retry and get a fast 'A' now that you know where to go.

The boss of the Asteroid Coaster in Sonic Colors. Beating him isn't hard, but you have only a ridiculously small chance of netting a high enough score for an S-Rank. To maximize your score, you have to use the Rocket Wisp every time the boss warps away (and the Rocket Wisp randomly appears from crates the boss throws at you and sometimes doesn't show up at all). And destroy all of the component parts of the boss before destroying his core (using the finicky homing attack). And collect lots of rings (and keep them to the end of the fight, which means you can't get hit at all). And rack up the quick step bonus as much as possible (constantly jerking Sonic back and forth whenever he isn't attacking). And, of course, be quick about it (take longer than 2 minutes and you may as well start over). The odds of all that coming together is astronomical, and has next to nothing to do with your skill.

I Wanna Be the Guy has Dracula. He's the only completely randomized boss, and can be an incredibly difficult fight, even by IWBTG standards.

Impossible Mission 2 had an infamous ending sequence: in the final room of the game are 3 identical computers. Using one of them will win you the game. The other two will instantly end the entire game regardless of remaining time or lives. Which computer is correct is randomised each game and there are no clues, in the game or in the manual, to tell you which is the correct computer. And you can't restore, so you'll have to start again from the beginning. This was likely done to hide the fact that, as with many Commodore 64 games, the ending was awful.

The mobile app game Subway Surfers gives you various missions to increase your ability to get a high score in the game. Most of them are fine, but every so often you'll get a mission stating "Collect 3 Magnets in a Single Run" or similar. These missions are entirely reliant on the item appearing during the course of your run. Fortunately if the Random Number God is not with you, you're able to spend coins to skip that particular mission.

Zombie Tsunami has this mechanic as well, thankfully, since a good chunk of its missions are at least partially luck-based (like amassing 30 zombies, partially down to the layout of hazards and powerups, or making a certain background appear, completely random).

At the end of Kid Klown In Crazy Chase, you're presented with ten locks. You've collected five keys over the course of the game. One of the locks works. There's no indication as to which one it is. Basically, it's a 50-50 shot... and if you get it wrong, the game gives you the worst possible ending and calls you an idiot. Now consider that getting the good ending requires a No Death Run where you also collect all the extremely missable cards, all of which you have to accomplish before this point and which failing at this moment turns into the worst ending anyway, and you have a lot of SNES controllers getting snapped in half.

Puzzle Game

In Minesweeper, since the boards are psuedo-randomly generated, you can easily end up with situations where there's no way to logically determine where the remaining mines are, and whichever square you click has an equal chance of containing a mine. Since the board is fixed after the first click of the mouse, you don't even get the mercy of Schrödinger's Gun. On top of that, some bootleg versions of the game are luck-based right from the very beginning — as the field is entirely obscured at first, it's perfectly possible to step on a mine in your first move.

In the standard Windows version of Minesweeper, the game is configured so that you cannot possibly hit a mine on your first move (i.e. the playing field is generated based on your first move to avoid generating a mine there). This is easy to see when the number of mines greatly exceeds 50% of the playing area when custom fields are generated, yet you still can never lose until the second click. Other renditions, however, are not always so fortunate. Regardless, any moves other than the first can easily be luck based.

Some incarnations of Minesweeper go the other way and avert this trope entirely: they generate the board based on your first click and ensure that there is a logical solution.

Catherine is overall a puzzle game that is lacking in requiring luck, since stacking blocks to form a staircase is overall more a logical activity. That is until Stage 9 of the game, where Mystery Blocks are added. These blocks have red curtains around the sides and will randomly transform into any of the block types when you step on them, so they could do no harm by turning into regular or heavy blocks, help the player advance faster by turning into a springboard block or utterly ruin everything because they turned into spike blocks or black hole blocks which spell insta-Death and Game Over for the player.

The final boss and its stage is worse! Not only does the final stage feature several Mystery Blocks, but one of the boss' form of attacking is causing randomly chosen blocks in the vicinity to randomly change their type... repeatedly. So there's an even higher chance that your lovely progress is ruined because he changed the block you were on and you could not dodge what it turned into fast enough.

Perhaps this is not the experience all players will have, but Reset Generation feels as though the entire game is built around luck and coincidence. If the right items drop in the right place, it's easy for anyone to completely wipe out the other players. Much of the time there seems to be very little strategy required at all; if a particularly useful item drops into your territory and you're able to defend it from being destroyed by cannon shots (an easy task), your opponents won't stand much of a chance... Unless an equally useful item falls into THEIR possession.

Plumber is actually a very brokencharacter in this regard. Items are usually the difference between victory and defeat, and his power allows him to fetch nearby items without actually walking to them, basically giving him weighted dice as far as item drops go. Basically, he's the High Priest to the Random Number God. It certainly doesn't help that he can grab a full-power-charge item, taking away his opponent's chance to grab it, and then grab another one as he pleases.

The latest version of Solitaire (Klondike, specifically) that comes ensuite with Windows Vista has the audacity to inform you that you've lost, even when it deals you a literally unwinnable game. It doesn't help that it now keeps a running tally of wins and losses.

Free Cell, in contrast, has only one Unwinnable game out of the ~32000 it will randomly deal.

The item crafting and spell learning mini-games in Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords. You are almost completely at the mercy of the board's configuration when it comes go gaining the requisite number of anvils or scrolls to gain the sought item, and if you run out of legal moves, the game ends and you have to start over.

The final battle with Lord Bane - especially if you're primarily a magic user: Bane literally gets stronger as the match goes on, thanks to his ludicrously low-cost stat buffing spells. You basically have to pray your spells don't get blocked (too much) and you don't get uber-cascaded into oblivion. If Bane gets rolling early, you're pretty much meat, not matter what class you play as.

The sequel, Galatrix, runs with this: adding time limits to the Gate Hack mini-games (and the cascades that would help you in battle work against you, since the clock keeps running and you can't make a move until they stop) and junk blocks to the rest or the mini-games.

The entire game of Trash Panic on PSN is luck based. It is a physics based Tetris style game, but the objects do not have uniform dimensions like the blocks of tetris, but consist of things like guitars and toilet bowls, making this game very very difficult.

The independent game Osmos is built entirely out of this trope. While the developers claim that the eat-blobs smaller than you and avoid bigger ones that eat you gameplay has a strategy to it, in reality (especially in the later levels) the only strategy involved is to reload the game constantly until you get a starting position that has blobs you can actually eat.

Puyo Puyo can be this at times, especially with higher levels where the pieces drop almost instantaneously and the AI is ruthless. But the most egregious example is the Endless Fever battle mode. Due to the offset mechanics, nuisance Puyo will not drop if you can clear just one group of four, making it easy to survive a very long time. Due to the margin time mechanics, surviving a very long time will eventually lead to a scenario where clearing just one group is enough to wipe out a full tray of warning Puyo and completely fill your opponent's tray. At this point, it is literally a matter of "whoever gets a piece that can't clear anything first, loses".

Immortal Souls is a sort of cross between Puzzle Quest and Bejeweled, where you have to match up colored tiles to take down matching color armor on your enemies. Meanwhile, using the wrong color on the wrong armor is much less effective. As a result, getting the right tile/armor matchup can make a battle a breeze, while getting the wrong one can make a battle drag out over multiple turns. And unlike you, your enemies never miss and always deal the same amount of damage. Then add on some enemies which have two or more different armor colors (usually bosses or the Templars), and it can take either grinding your attack stats or repeated attempts at getting good luck to win. Argh.

Candy Crush Saga, a game that is also similar to Bejeweled, has some levels which can be incredibly frustrating, but later levels introduce Candy Bombs that will go off after a set amount of moves. However, some levels have them so tightly set up that it is almost impossible to take out the bomb in the set amount of moves unless if the candies are there.

The Impossible Quiz is virtually unwinnable on a first playthrough for even the cleverest thanks to it's Insane Troll Logic questions. And then some of the questions have a different answer every time, making it a luck based mission even if you memorized the answers.

There are times where the only way to move forward in a Sudoku game is to guess. Fortunately, there is no losing in Sudoku, just having to backtrack to undo the incorrect guess.

Some of the levels in Lemmings fall into this. There's a stage in which the Lemmings fall into a 1-pixel wide gap between two pillars. Due to the AI of Lemmings walking forward until they hit a wall and then turning around, this causes the Lemmings trapped in this gap to change their direction every single frame. In order to beat the level you need to get the Lemming to bash through the right pillar, one of which will create a path to the goal once destroyed while bashing the other one will result in your Lemmings falling into lava. Due to the fact that the Lemmings will bash whatever they are currently facing it's impossible to time this since they're changing directions far too rapidly to read.

Real Time Strategy

Pikmin 2's Challenge Mode has a luck-based level called Concrete Maze. It has 3 floors. You have a strict time limit on each floor. The first floor is a maze with randomly placed destructible walls blocking most of the dead ends, a key behind one of the randomly placed walls, & a buried exit behind another one of the randomly placed walls. The buried exit will only emerge after you get your pikmin to take the key to the ship (which takes a really long time if the key is really far from the ship). The second floor is like the first floor but it's bigger, it has way more paths, & bomb carrying spiders randomly fall from above to suicide attack you & your pikmin. All you have to do on the third floor is throw your pikmin into flowers to get more pikmin & have your pikmin get some treasure for you that's laid out for you. That floor is really easy if you don't assume you need to be careful about which colors of pikmin you get from the 3 flowers (which change colors every few seconds so going for specific colors takes a while).

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: There is a Nod mission where you have to send a small force through GDI infested territory to recapture a Scrin ship, then storm Vega's base to retrieve the Tacitus. Getting the Tacitus is a matter of sending your two Attack Buggies in, praying all the forces attack them, then sending a Scout Cycle in to destroy the train car and finish the level. If any of the enemy units opened fire on the Cycle, you were screwed.

One of the most painful ones is Operation Stiletto, a Nod mission where you have to capture the Construction Yards/Drone Platforms of four separate bases, all intact. If any of the Yards/Platforms are destroyed, you automatically lose. The problem is that the GDI and Scrin forces are fighting each other, and will gladly destroy their opponents' bases, including the buildings you need to protect, forcing you to simply hope they don't break through each others' lines until you can build up your forces enough to stop them.

The 6th Nod mission. You had to do a suicidal run into the middle of an enemy base in order to pick up a package with a small, fragile strike team with no reinforcements, and then reach an evac helicopter on the other side of the map - all while being harassed by enemy patrols. It basically came down to praying that the enemy would ignore at least one of your units while you make the escape to the helicopter, or else it'd be gunned down helplessly.

The underrated game Constructor, upon reaching certain stages in house construction, would make certain demands of you to build X number of houses/facilities on one estate with X features. However, it also imposes varying arbitrary quotas on how many houses of each type you're permitted to build. If, upon reaching the penultimate stage in the game, it asks you to build the wrong type of house, the quota will forbid you from building enough and you'll be sacked (Read: Taken out of your headquarters in a coffin while you're sleeping and buried alive).

Europa Universalis III lets the player play ANY nation that is implemented into the game and existed historically during the time period. This includes historical strategy gaming mainstays like France, England and the Netherlands, but also tiny minor nations like the Irish kingdoms of Leinster and Connaught. Playing one of the Irish minor nations basically depends on little other than whether England will want to annex all of Ireland early on, and whether England gets into enough trouble with the French, Scottish and Burgundy.

This is valid for any country in any given game made by Paradox team. There are almost no certain things here, even for mainstays. From the moment you start the game, it's alternative history of humankind. Random events can make or destroy continent-spanning empires in few years (or weeks in Hearts of Iron). Random Number God is one of most important factors in battles, sometimes more powerful than technological, numerical and tactical advantages and God help you if you don't have those advantages. Later add-ons for EU3 take it to extremes in terms of succession. It's entirely possible to inherit half of the continent via sheer luck and a single, long-forgotten pact... or to see a powerful empire being balkanized into a bunch of laughably weak states after a succession mess or revolt created by a sighted comet.

Playing as a weak or very minor country tends to be a Self-Imposed Challenge not because of the skill needed to succeed, but because it's usually sheer luck that allows you to stay afloat for the first century or two.

UFO Aftermath base defense missions, which randomly scatter your men. How does trying to take on whole squads of laser-toting aliens with your weakest member because the rest of the team is in a different room sound?

Age of Empires has an example: In the Babylonian mission Lost, you start on an island with several archers and a priest. You have to go to the north of the island, use the archers to kill all but one archer on a second island, use the priest to convert a priest on the other island, immediately use that priest to convert the remaining archer that opens fire the moment the priest is converted, hope the priest can convert the archer before the archer kills him, and then use the archer to attack a transport at the northern end of the second island to send it towards the first so the two priests can work together to convert it.

Or, just use your own priest to directly convert the Transport Ship. It might only work on the expansion, though.

In mission 5, as the Imperium, you have to destroy a Freedom Guard base while preventing them from destroying the Water Extraction Compound, located in their base. They attack it when you breach their defenses, so you have to be ready to charge in and destroy everything quickly. However, you have no way of knowing what they've got in the way of units, so you have to pray they don't have half an army ready to destroy it.

In mission 8, once again as the Imperium, you have to flee your base, which is hopelessly overrun, and take a MacGuffin to an extraction point to receive reinforcements. However, the only way to do this is to hide out on the lake west of the base, wait for the Freedom Guard to finish destroying the base and leave, then move back through the wreckage. However, if the Freedom Guard army catches a glimpse of the transport or any other units heading out onto the lake, the army won't leave the area. Considering the MacGuffin is both sluggish and armored with tinfoil, it's almost impossible to get through. And god help you if you run into a marauding Spider Bike.

In the final level, the Tograns' survival is dependent entirely on what the Imperium does. If they attack your base too early, you'll be obliterated. If they attack the Freedom Guard too aggressively, they'll punch through and destroy the Orbital Defense Matrix, which is the only thing preventing the activation of an Imperium Kill Sat (read: Non Standard Game Over). If they don't attack the Freedom Guard enough, the Guard will attack you. And if the Guard and Imperium attack at the same time...

Atom Zombie Smasher is a grand example of this. The game randomly places zombie infestations, spawn points, and even what mercenaries at at your disposal during a given battle. The game could be over before the it even started.

In Pyramid Rising every level has a goal called "gold time" that gives your city some new building or enhancement. In some levels, meeting this goal is only possible if the correct purchases show up at the right times at the port.

In the primitive strategy game Bokosuka Wars, combat wins and losses are based on what is essentially a dice roll.

Rhythm Game

Pump It Up NX2 and NXA have a World Max mission with the song Deja Vu. At specific parts of the song, the chart can change into one of multiple patterns. Unlike most instances of this trope, this chart is actually a popular one.

In Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, there are a few segments called "Guitar Battle" in which you face off against a computer (or player) opponent and play for power-ups to use on one another. These power-ups, ideally, are used to make the other person fail the song or at least prevent them from obtaining power-ups of their own. The luck-based success is against the final boss on the Expert difficulty - if one is lucky enough to both have a non-fatal power-up used against them at first and then acquire a 'whammy attack' power-up of their own, the boss can be promptly defeated much, much more easily than via any other power-up combination.

DanceDanceRevolution SuperNOVA's Stellar Master mission mode often has mission requirements that are entirely luck-based—i.e., playing multiple songs in a row with a (randomly-selected) onscreen character of the same gender.

The end of the song "Tohoku EVOLVED" has a jump that comes at the end of the song, preceded by a sudden spike in scroll BPM to 1020, and is always randomized to be one of four "corner" jumpsnote L+U, U+R, R+D, or D+L. Because the chart is scrolling so fast, hitting it boils down to hitting one corner jump and praying that it's the correct jump. For those who played the song as an Encore Extra Stage in DanceDanceRevolution X3, with a one-point lifebar, this means that no matter how well one played up to this point, you had a 75% chance of failing the song.

Sound Shapes has Death Mode, in which you must collect notes spawned one by one randomly over a map, within a ludicrously tight time limit, to go along with the instant-death enemies, projectiles and inability to touch most surfaces. One attempt can see three or four notes spawn right next to one another, others having notes appear on the other side of the map. Even a perfect run of certain spawning patterns cannot possibly be done within the timer.

The whole point of the Vegas character in Audiosurf, whose powers are the ability to shuffle the board and generate random powerups.

Roguelike

ADOM has a number of subquests that are uncompletable if the RNG decides it doesn't like you. For example, the dwarven elder asks you to kill a random creature, which may be disgustingly rare or far more powerful than you can handle until much later in the game - this locks out most of the rest of his quests as well. The road to the Ultra Endings and the Trident of the Red Rooster is especially infuriating: Gaab'Baay wants a boar skull which first requires a rare wilderness encounter with a boar and then a random corpse drop, then she wants a scroll of danger which is also quite rare, and Khelevaster needs an Amulet of Life Saving.

Dwarf Fortress, on the whole, is a strange fusion of luck and skill, with luck most noticeably determining just how stupid your dwarves will act (EG: dodging by leaping off a cliff). However, the truly luck-based missions enter when either noblemen make demands or someone has a strange mood; will you be lucky enough to have the requisite materials on hand? Will you be lucky enough for them to exist within the world? It is quite possible to generate a world with next-to-no iron in it and have someone demand steel furnishings. And if none of your neighbours have iron, you can forget about trading for it...

While most roguelikes (like say NetHack) have a fair bit of luck involved in winning, Dungeon Crawl takes this to the extreme in the early portions of the game. All classes start out woefully under-equipped (mages don't even carry a backup weapon) for a long expedition, and worse, survival early on relies heavily on two things: being lucky enough to find some special equipment (finding something like a dagger of venom can help immensely), and being lucky enough not to encounter any of the many unique enemies you can encounter from level 2 of the dungeon onward (it would not be unusual to see Sigmund as well as another unique enemy on the same level). Once you've levelled up a bit and built up equipment, it gets a bit more manageable, but the early game can be outright unwinnable if it decides to screw you over because of how limited your options for escape are.

Don't come across any weapons during your playthrough? It's possible and it make the end boss nearly unwinnable.

It's also possible to come across a fleeing ship and fail to hit its before it escapes, resulting in accelerated Rebel advancement.

The Crystal Cruiser is absolutely notorious for this. It requires you to find an event that is exclusive to certain sectors, followed by another event that is also exclusive to certain sectors, then finding a specific sector so you can jump to the hidden sector to unlock the ship. This is because the unlock is considered a colossal Game-Breaker.

The toughest dungeons in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series qualify. They allow only a single party member, reduce your level to 1 (Or 5 in Gates To Infinity), prevent you from bringing money or items, and deny the use of IQ/Team skills. Your success thus tends to be heavily dependent on whether or not you're able to locate the right items to help you stay alive, plus you also need to worry about the ever present threat of traps and monster houses, which can occasionally appear in positions that make it completely impossible avoid them if you want to reach the next floor.

The Binding of Isaac is an action game at heart, so it should be theoretically possible to win on skill alone. The No Damage Runs you can earn achievements for completing, however, are not: Some combinations of room layouts and enemies are literally impossible to get through safely unless you happen to have the right powerups. So if you're going for those achievements, not only do you have to be 100% perfect at the game, you have to pray you never encounter one of those rooms. (Thankfully, taking damage through other luck-based means, like getting a pill that turns out to be a "Bad Trip", don't count against them.)

Role Playing Game

Certain Role Playing Games have aspects of the Luck-Based Mission to them, particularly in battles with powerful enemies. If an enemy uses an especially powerful attack twice in a row (which is sometimes rare, sometimes distressingly frequent — Luck), it could mean the death of your party, regardless of how strong you are at the time. This sort of arrangement is common in games that use an A.I. Roulette; enemies that cannot be made intelligent may end up leveling the playing field by using overwhelming attacks on a random basis. Sometimes random damage can also affect the gameplay when fighting against tough enemies.

Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II had several enemies, such as cockatrices and ghouls, that could inflict paralysis or instant death on your party. If they ambushed you, they could kill you without you ever getting a chance to fight back.

There's also Echidna, in the Dawn of Souls and Anniversary edition of Final Fantasy 1, whose earthquake spell can inflict instant death on your entire party, even with protection against instant death.

The Dragon Quest series takes this idea to a new level, especially in Dragon Quest VIII. Pretty much every attack every random encounter has is remarkably powerful. On the other hand, almost all of them (even the most badass bosses) have certain moves in their repertoire that more or less boil down to staring off into space and wasting a turn. The fact that they're stupidly powerful when they hit you with their best shot but sometimes don't hit you with any shot at all is supposed to balance out in the end, but of course, this is random....

And if you should want to resurrect someone who just died, good luck: the basic resurrection abilities have a random chance of failing.

Invoked deliberately with Metal Slimes in the series. Most attacks against them either do 1 damage or nothing, and they have a chance to flee every turn. Certain abilities give you an edge against them (either attacks that always deal 1 damage to Metal Slimes, attacks that strike multiple times, or all-or-nothing abilities that can land defense-ignoring Critical Hits), but even then it boils down to whether the Metal Slime sticks around long enough to land the final blow against it.

Success in reaching the Dragonlord in Dragon Quest I is almost entirely decided by how often you run away successfully and how many enemies put you to sleep. If you're downright unlucky, a monster can put you to sleep with his first turn and then wail on you until you die. Even if you survive the gauntlet of downright unfair enemies on the way down the floors of the Dragonlord's castle, you still need enough MP left over to kill him too. Also, his first form can silence your healing spells, though it is possible to run away from him and re-engage him with your spells enabled again. Yes, you can actually run away from the final boss in this game, but it's just as luck-based as anything else.

Dragon Quest II had an enemy spell called Sacrifice, which is an instant party wipe that never misses. If a random encounter knows this spell (although very few do), and it goes first, you are completely fucked. Have fun redoing the entire Road to Rhone.

The final boss's three parts in Dragon Quest VI can do over 500 damage to a single target if the RNG decides it really doesn't like someone. Only about a third of that can be resisted to any degree. Long story short, if the game feels like it, one of your party members is dying, everyone else is taking a ton of damage as well, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The difficulty of the Disc-One Final Boss also boils down to how often he dualcasts his two hit-everyone attacks, which together can drain nearly all of your two Squishy Wizards' HP. This is before you can have any multi-target healing, and you'll only have one character who can even heal one person for more damage than they took or even revive those who fall (again, this has only a 50% chance)...if you've taken the time to grind up your newest party member.

Dragon Quest VIII also features a very annoying random encounter enemy that has Death Dance, a move that can kill 3 members of your party in one turn, if you're unlucky, leaving you prey for a quick party wipe even if normally you'd be at no risk.

You think 8 is bad? Try Dragon Quest IX. Oh, the main game doesn't invoke this trope. And neither does most of the post game. But high level Legacy bosses get 3 turns. Even with a maxed out party if they attack the same person twice or critically hit them once they will die. One character can use an item that will protect against the latter, but the other three have no recourse except to rely on an evade rate that caps around 20-25%. Most of them also have an AoE move that will do about 300-350 to you. Your max HP is in the 810-900 range if you don't farm 1/256 drops repeatedly and 999 if you do. Either way if they do that move three times in a round, instant Game Over. They also have the dreaded Disruptive Wave. However there is another side to them being luck based fights. The easier Legacy bosses can be soloed with sufficient farming, provided they don't Disruptive Wave too often.

Beyond battles, IX has MANY quests that are completely luck based. You simply have to wait for an item to drop. Sometimes it'll happen the first battle...sometimes it'll take forever. "Kill 3 Metal Medleys with a certain Spear skill that only has about 10% chance of working"?"Kill a certain enemy with a Critical Hit, and skills that give you an automatic crit don't count"?"Kill certain monsters with the elements they're most resistant to"?

And really, the series as a whole has LEVELING a part of this. For the most part you will not gain any reasonable experience outside of finding metal slimes and their ilk...which are both very rare and LOVE to run away.

The third Monster Girl Quest installment, the first half in particular, is largely based on luck. You have to rely on the techniques Fallen Angel Dance and Serene Mind to block/dodge some of the attacks of foes which would otherwise curb-stomp you. Since luck plays a huge part in how often these techiques protect you, battles can range from complete cake-walks to Nintendo Hard to actually impossible depending on how many times the Random Number God decides to let you dodge attacks.

There are enough times in the battles of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door where random effects can spontaneously happen that you can never truly rely on your own skill or character's power level. Either you or your opponent can randomly be frozen or turned invisible, fog can fill the arena rendering most attacks ineffective, and you have absolutely no control over when it happens or what will happen. As the game's core mechanic relies on Timed Hits, you can be steam-rolling a random encounter only to be randomly frozen, take a beating, and get a Game Over, losing all your progress, purely because the Random Number God decided to say "screw you". Calling it a Scrappy Mechanic is an understatement as, unlike every enemy attack in the game barring one from the intently difficult Bonus Boss, you can not Superguard or even defend against some of these effects at all.

Black Sigil has the main quest being the removal of a curse on the main character, which in gameplay terms results on him getting random status ailments at the beginning of battles. It's not much of an issue as you'll usually have two more party members to back him up, but if you get Cripple, Slow or Blind during one of the more difficult battles, or worse the Duel Boss, you'll enjoy restarting from the last save point.

The Physica Absorbus spell can turn any simple fight into a hair-tearing game of chance. Contrarily to how drain attacks usually behave, it heals the user for eight times the damage caused, meaning even a weak hit can completely heal the monster who used it. Throw in the fact that all monsters have a decent chance of countering any hit with a random spell, and a whim of the Random Number God can turn any damage you cause into a free shot at you and healing back all the damage you caused, and then some.

Breath of Fire II has the fight with Habaruku. Depending on which spells the random AI picks, he'll either completely waste you in two turns, or not hurt you at all.

Also, in Highfort, you only have one character in your party and have to deal with random encounters with enemies who have an instant death spell in their repertoire. Your character isn't a powerhouse so you can always count on an enemy launching an attack. Just hope it isn't a Death spell.

A certain fishing spot can only be accessed if you travel from one point to another without running into a random battle. As they are random, and often frequent in that area, this is a luck-based sidequest. You can skip random encounters using the game's flight power, but that's gained several chapters after the sidequest is first available, and is permanently missable well before the end of the game.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest's first fight (which also begins the game) pits Benjamin against a Behemoth. Both characters can only attack, and their attacks naturally have a chance of missing. If you miss more often than you hit, or if the Behemoth lands lots of criticals, you're selecting "Try Again", no questions.

Any battle featuring enemies with petrification or instant death attacks, which become more frequent later in the game, can be this. Many times they can spam these moves and wipe out both party members before you have a chance to get back on your feet. Good thing Death Is a Slap on the Wrist in this game.

Final Fantasy VI's Auction House. There are 2 magicite items you can get there to learn some nice spells, but they have pretty low odds of showing up (3/16 chance for the first and 1/8 for the second), and the auction takes quite a while to finish each time it's the wrong item.

The likelihood of succeeding at the chocobo racing mini-game in Final Fantasy X is highly dependent on the number and locations of the balloons and hazards, which can vary widely and appear to be randomized.

Most notably, in the first turn. If a bird nails you there, you're done.

No matter the generaton, catching pretty much any legendary Pokémon. Sure, you can give it status effects, whittle its health down to a sliver, etc., but thanks to having the lowest catch rates of any Pokémon, it ultimately boils down to "Will the game decide that I've caught the legendary before I run out of Ultra Balls/it runs out of PP and KOs itself with Struggle?" It helps that the catch rate is subject to a lot of variants; calculating them is possible, but not guaranteed to suceed. Even in the optimal situation for catching one, most have a success rate of about 18%. Fortunately, scenarios where you need to catch a legendary to proceed with the game give them a higher catch rate.

And then you have roaming legendaries. Starting in Pokémon Gold and Silver with the legendary beasts (Raikou, Entei, Suicune) and continued on by several more Pokémon, even merely finding them is luck-based. Spending hours chasing them around by looking at the map to see where they are, moving to another area, checking the map, moving to another area... repeat ad nauseum. It almost never works, either. In some games, this is made even worse by having to run into each one of them at least once before you can track them your map. That's right, you need to be lucky enough to run into one of them by chance before you can start actually hunting them.

At least in Gen IV (including the remade versions of Gen II), the map on the Pokétch/Pokégear has a tracking feature on it, so you don't have to worry about the luck aspect of the initial finding anymore. Gen V was also kind enough to have its roamers come with storms that track on the electric signs in the gatehouses (and, better yet, you only have to worry about one in Black or White, and none at all in Black 2 or White 2).

Catching Feebas is this in Generation III and especially IV. In both generations, Feebas can only be found in one area in the game. In Gen III, they appear in a river that consists of hundred tiles in total and Feebas only appears in six of them. SIX. Thought that was bad? In Gen IV, they only appear in a lake and only in four tiles, which are randomized every day. Want to catch a Feebas? You either need a lot of patience... or a lot of luck. Thankfully, Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire adds fixed spots where you can find Feebas 100% of the time.

In Platinum, Beldum may possibly be even worse to catch than the Legendaries. As if the incredibly low catch rate AND Take Down weren't bad enough, you have to wait for a swarm of them to appear, which could take days, possibly even weeks, so you'd have to be patient to even get the opportunity to confront one. This also means that if you miss out on the swarm day, or simply fail to catch one in time, you're boned and have to wait again. Then they only appear on the route that causes constant sandstorm damage to most of your Pokemon. And, since Beldum's only attack inflicts damage on itself,you could do everything right and it could still kill itself.

Pokémon Battle Revolution has a few luck-based coliseums. In the first, you have a roulette wheel to determine whether you get to use one of your own Pokemon, or one of your opponent's far less useful ones. In the second, it's a 100-battle endurance match, where the roulette is used to determine if any of your Pokemon get healed. The roulette can actually be controlled with good timing, though, since it decelerates at a fixed rate rather than randomly, but learning the timing will require a few spins of it.

Not to mention that the 100 battle match has fog on most of its stages, which makes all pokemon's accuracy drop. Sure it's totally fair, as it affects both sides equally, but over 100 battles, the probability approaches 100% that you will eventually be horribly screwed while the computer is unaffected. Remember that you need to win 100 battles with no losses, while the computer can lose 99 battles and still beat you at the 100th.

The Honey Trees in Gen IV. If you're lucky, you'll be able to catch Pokémon like Aipom, Heracross and Cherubi that can't be found anywhere else. If you're not lucky, you'll get Wurmples. On every single tree. Adding to the luck factor is that it takes six hours for a Pokémon to appear, and Save Scumming doesn't work as the Pokémon you will encounter is determined the moment you slather the tree. At least the level and gender are randomized before an encounter, though, making it a little bit easier, yet still frustrating, to catch that elusive female Combee.

As an added batch of fun, Munchlax is found on precisely four trees, which require the use of a calculator and knowledge of a value found only by hacking shiny Pokémon to determine which of about a dozen are those trees. It's still a 1% chance once you know which trees it is.

Platinum also has the "5 Maid Knockout Exact-Turn Attack Challenge" in the (Sinnoh) Pokémon Mansion. You have to beat five trainers in a row (itself pretty easy since they're all using one Clefairy each at level 25-33), but in an exact number of turns. The "luck-based" part comes from the fact that the total number is usually only one or two more turns, and every single Clefairy knows Endure, so not only do you have to be able to knock them out, you have to hope they don't use Endure at the wrong time or it becomes completely impossible (and the little bit of control you can get is with Taunt, which can only work for the last match). Just to rub salt in the wound, what's actually worth taking this challenge for is the chance to fight one of two trainers holding a Rare Candy (thus this is one of the only ways that item can be farmed) that you need Thief or Trick to get and have to use before the enemy destroys the item by using Fling. And you only get to take this challenge once a day. Hello, soft reset!

In Contests in Gen IV, there is no way, repeat no way to beat the Master Rank unless you're incredibly lucky. And this is merely an improvement from the Gen III Contests, which were comparably worse due to jamming moves.

A good chunk of the dungeons in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games qualify as well. Purity Forest and Zero Isle South, for example. Not only did they have 99 floors, but you could not take any items, money or teammates with you, you could not recruit anything inside, your level was reduced to one and you were forced to save before going in, meaning that essentially whether you made it through or not depended on how quickly you could locate the stairs and what items you could find.

A few rare trainers love using evasion-increasing moves like Double Team, which are actually banned in competitive play for being too luck-based. The worst offender is probably Janine in Pokémon Stadium 2, whose entire strategy revolves around using Baton Pass with several layers of Double Team. And every one of her Baton Pass targets have either Swagger or Confuse Ray, dropping your percent chance of landing a hit to the single digits while she slowly tortures you to death with Toxic and blocking your escape with Spikes and Mean Look. Either you come fully prepared with a team that packs Haze and Heal Bell, or prepare for a ridiculously long fight.

The first Stadium game wasn't above using luck-based challenges either. The fourth battle in the final round of the Prime Cup throws the Gambler at you, who has possibly the most aggravating strategy of all the opponents you'll face; paralyze your Pokemon with either Body Slam or Thunder Wave so his mons outspeed yours, then spam one-hit KO moves nonstop. What makes this even worse is that his team is actually of varying types of Pokemon who are all pretty durable, and he's actually smart enough to switch them out when faced with a bad matchup. You could either sweep him effortlessly or get completely annihilated; it's all up to luck. And considering how Pokemon Stadium is with giving your opponents fantastic luck....

The Safari Zone. It's pretty much either catch the Pokémon instantly with the crappy Safari Ball (which you'll eventually swear is just a normal Pokéball painted over), or watch that Chansey with a 1% chance of appearing (hence the Japanese name "Lucky") run for the hills. Your only aid in helping with this? Pebbles/Mud that really helps raise the catch rate and make it easier for the Pokémon to run away, or Bait that makes it harder to catch the Pokémon, but lowers the likelihood of the Pokémon running away. Naturally, this is in every game before Gen V, and when it came back in OR/AS, the setup is no different from finding/catching Pokémon anywhere else in Hoenn.

In Pokémon XD, there is the "Metronome Cup." You fight two Pokémon with two of your own. All of the Pokémon have only one move — Metronome, a move that summons any other move at random. Winning or losing is literally and entirely based on luck. There is no strategy involved in the least. It's rather fun, however.

Voltorb Flip in the international versions of HeartGold/SoulSilver is basically Minesweeper with much more random guessing. While it is quite deep, some boards are really unsolvable, like ones with something close to "Sum 5/Voltorb 2" on every row and column. Boards like those always require 2 to 4 guesses, which translates to a 1/4 to 1/16 chance of winning, given perfect play. And there's always the chance of landing on a Voltorb on the first turn, even when the row says 7/1 and the column says 8/1 ... And a first turn Voltorb means back to Lvl 1.

They have online calculators for Voltorb Flip. However, every one of them has a disclaimer that basically amounts to "Voltorb Flip is a Luck Based Mission. This calculator can only give you a reasonable idea of which tiles are safe."

Like Real Life Casinos, Game Corners in general are a Luck Based Mission. Compared to the outrageously rigged slots in the other generations, Voltorb Flip is downright forgiving. Some actually preferred the luck-based slots, though, since it was much faster-paced and you could just buy casino coins if you were rich and impatient.

How about the Battle Frontier? You have to win 49/100/170 consecutive times without losing once, and without any continues (and you can't save and reset, you get disqualified). And the game can be brutal about luck sometimes. Say, you meet an opponent with Brightpowder (held item that increases evasion), and has a one-hit KO move, which hits 30% of the time. It's extremely common in the Frontier that both Brightpowder and the one-hit KO move takes effect. Sometimes 3 times in a row, and the matches are 3 vs 3. Say goodbye to your hours of winning. Oh, and the game does mock you if you lose, as if you played bad.

The Battle Factory is the worst, because you don't even get to play with your own team, instead, you are given random Pokémon to fight, and it resets every 7 matches (there are 49 matches to be won). So unless you get strong Pokémon in all 7 sets, you are screwed.

The Battle Pike of the Emerald Battle Frontier is unashamedly one. Pick a pathway and hope it's a safe one. While there are guides who can give you an idea of what lies behind each door, they're not perfect. Oh, and there's little to no healing, so you'll want to avoid paths with battles as much as possible. No wonder your reward for completing it is the Luck Symbol...

Stadium 2's Challenge Mode is probably the worst offender. The game is already heavily rigged in the computer's favor in every match, but Challenge Mode makes it worse by forcing you to use 6 randomly generated Pokémon that are almost guaranteed to be complete crap, and then use them to fight the (much better) random Pokémon the computer gets in 4 difficulty levels. The description of the mode says "This mode tests your ability as a trainer", but it would be more accurately described as "This mode tests your ability to resist carpal tunnel syndrome from how many times you'll have to reload the game upon getting a terrible team".

The Vermilion City Gym could also count. In order to deactivate the electric gates blocking your path to Lt. Surge, you need to flip a pair of switches. What the game tells you is that they're placed randomly, and that the second switch is always next to the first. What the game doesn't tell you is that only half of the cans can even contain the first switch, and not all adjacent cans are necessarily eligible to contain the second switch. What the game can't tell you, because it's due to a programming error, is that the top left can is almost always one of the options for the second switch, even though it's not adjacent to any of the options for the first switch. So, yes, there's a tiny chance of looking in the top left can twice in a row and finding both switches.

The very battle system itself is luck based to an extent. You can plan and strategize as much as you possibly can, but if the game decides it doesn't want a move/item/ability/side effect with a less than 100% chance of working to succeed, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Then there are critical hits, which are possible for almost every move but are also almost always random. Some moves choose targets at random in double and triple battles and others (and a hold item) force the opponent's to switch out at random. Even damage itself has a random variance range rather than being entirely fixed by stats. There are still some other luck based factors not yet mentioned here.

The Dream World from Pokémon Black and White was intended as a successor to HeartGold and SoulSilver's Pokéwalker in that it's an alternative means to obtain Pokémon and items for your game. While it did do that, it preferred to send players to random locations rather than letting the player pick the location to explore for themselves, and you could only take ten steps each visit before leaving and Pokémon would stop coming to you after so many visits in a day.

Trying to get certain rare Pokemon from Hidden Grottos in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. Half the time it's an item you find, or a Pokémon you have/don't want.

Breeding in any game, if you aren't an RNGer. Getting one aspect isn't too hard. You can control inherited moves easily as long as your breeders don't level up too much in the daycare (before Gen VI) and getting the right nature is easy with one parent holding an Everstone, and with only one or two abilities, it isn't hard getting the right one, but getting all at once can be aggravating.. And good stat parents help your IV chances but do not guarantee good stat offspring. Even worse is trying for shiny Pokémon. The Masuda method of using one parent from a foreign language game helps, as does Gen V's and VI's Shiny Charm, but the chance is still low. Arceus help you if you're breeding for shiny, good stats and correct nature all at once.

Gen VI introduces Wonder Trade. You offer one Pokémon, and you get a random Pokémon in return. You won't know what you get until it comes. It could be anything from a legendary to a starter to a Com Mon to anything in between.

It also brings back the exact-turn battle challenges from Platinum in the form of restaurants, although going a couple turns above or below the par will merely give you a smaller prize, giving you some leeway. The higher-level restaurants, though, will actively try to screw you up by throwing everything they can into defense. And the last one squares the whole luck factor by engaging you in rotating battles, in which the Pokémon you target is completely random. Fail too many guesses and you're guaranteed to get a dent in your wallet.

Final Fantasy XII seems to be entirely made of randomness. Most of the best equipment is based on enemy loot, which drops very VERY randomly. The chests that are the backbone of exploration? They appear randomly, and contain random contents. The high-powered rare enemies for completionists? Go figure, most of them also appear randomly. It would be one thing if you had somewhat of a chance, but many of these "random" chances can range from 10% all the way down to 0.1%.

And then there's pulling off the most powerful Concurrence in the game, which is required to earn a specific achievement and complete The Sky Pirate's Den, which is required to earn the highest clan rank. Successfully pulling this move off depends on 98% luck and 2% twitch reflexes. The reward for earning the highest clan rank? A Bragging Rights Reward.

In Final Fantasy XIII, if the leader you're controlling gets KO'd you lose. This means some boss battles and even random encounters boil down to praying to god that they don't all decide to gang up on your leader, because even some of the Mooks will do enough damage to kill a character in one round if they concentrate their attacks.

Not to mention enemies that use attacks with an instant death property. Fortunately, most of those attacks have a piddling 1% chance of success, so it's not too bad...until you get to the first form of the final boss, who uses an attack with a 50% chance of success, meaning that even with Death-resistance accessories there's still an ever-present chance that it will instantly cause a Game Over wthout you being able to do anything about it.

It's literally a Mission with Mission 55, when fighting a Neochu and 5 Picochu. Attempting this mission at the end of Chapter 11 is a pretty bad idea, since your party is not strong enough to survive easily, though the pay-off (the Growth Egg, doubles CP obtained post-battle if worn in active party) is definitely worth it if you will. The best way to complete this Mission is by controlling Vanille (who has some pretty bad HP Growth) and spamming her Death spell over and over, and having Snow act as the meatshield while Hope takes care of healing. Problem is that you likely won't even get to do anything, since Neochu enjoys attacking your leader first... so you could easily retry the battle a few times just to be able to do one thing in the battle! And even then, Death has only a 1% chance of connecting (+1% added for every Debuff on the enemy) so you could either get really lucky and have it die fast or take its sweet time. Sure, you can come back here late in Chapter 12 or post-game, but where's the fun in that?

In Nocturne, sometimes you're going through an area you're +10 levels over, and you'll get ambushed. The enemy then uses your weaknesses for extra rounds, gets a few lucky crits on the hero and BAM! Game Over. And you didn't even get a chance to counter attack.

Furthermore, if merely the main character dies, it's Game Over. There's two different elements full of nothing but instant kill spells that work startlingly well, and if you want to resist or null one of them, you become weak to the other, until really rather late to the game where you start getting better Magatama. Naturally, a large number of random encounters pack at least one of the two instant kill elements, making most random encounters with them a Luck Based Mission.

Persona 3's PSP version has Maniac Mode. The enemies hit twice as hard, the AI is better, and the enemies are much more likely to get the advantage if a battle starts with neither side ambushing the other. This is bad, because an ambushed party, no matter what level, always has a chance of being taken out once you've gone about halfway through the game's one dungeon. Made even worse by the fact that only the player character has to be killed for a game over, and the enemies will often gang up and expose weaknesses. Making it even worse is that in order to save you have to stop what you're doing and exit the dungeon, only able to re-start at select pit-stop floors that are spaced ever 15-20 floors apart. So if you're unlucky enough to get ambushed on any floor above 70, chances are you're about to lose 1-2 hours of gameplay.

Persona 4 features a luck-based mission that requires playing the fishing mini-game until you catch a big fish, and then trading that in so you can try and catch an even bigger fish. This mission must be finished if you want to max the Hermit Social Link. Largely fixed in The Golden, which heavily expanded on the fishing mini-game and let the player fish multiple times a day.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has a luck-based Final Boss at the end of the Neutral path. Its second form has an attack that is a guaranteed instant kill against whoever it hits, with no way to protect against it. Yes, it can target you. This essentially means every time the boss casts it, you have a 1 in 4 chance (AT BEST) of dying. Even if you're at level 99.

While the game is overall more forgiving than past SMT games, Demon Negotiations in Shin Megami Tensei IV are almost entirely luck-based as the Demons give no indication as to what the correct response is, and even if you do everything correct they may choose to leave with your items anyway. Additionally, enemy reinforcements can show up after any battle, and may automatically have priority. Given the game's Rocket-Tag Gameplay, this can be a very, very bad thing.

Mushroom #VIII in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+. True, this is only a sidequest required for 100% Completion, but then again, the type of people who play the Final Mixes are completionists. Anyways, this sidequest, no matter what strategy you use, requires a complicated setup and can be resource-intensive—so you will be Save Scumming. The point is to keep the mushroom in the air by hitting it and never allowing it to touch the ground; what makes it luck-based is the completely random direction the mushroom will jet off to every few rounds of hits. It requires as well very fine-tuned timing and hand-eye coordination, yet if luck is not with you, you will lose. Oh, and how many times must the mushroom be hit? Eighty-five times, minimum.

Some of the bosses in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep also qualify, most notably the Mysterious Figure and Vanitas' Lingering Spirit. To specify, neither boss has any sort of recognizable pattern to their attacks; their actions are determined almost entirely by an RNG, so MF may just spam his X-Beam attack, in which case he's not very challenging, or he may randomly decide to create clones of himself, fire lazers from all directions, turn invisible, and use his "rape-rope", all at the same time, in which case you might as well put your PSP down. Another factor that comes into play is that both of these bosses have a random chance to avoid all damage. VLS will teleport away from an attack before it connects and counter, while MF takes it a step further, actually turning back time to before he was hit and attacking the player before they launch their attack. Whereas most action games (including the other Kingdom Hearts games) will give enemies a threshold of damage that they can take before they break out of the player's combo, these guys simply have a random percent chance to avoid all damage, every single time they're struck, and even if the player catches them while they would otherwise be vulnerable, meaning that the player's actual ability to deal damage (and thus defeat the boss) is determined entirely by chance.

A hint that the Wizardry series of RPG's are luck-based can be found in the "terminate game" battle order in Wizardry VII. Taking a step-equivalent (a single step, turning around, etc) has a percentage chance of triggering a fight-so you could theoretically finish off one group of enemies, turn ninety degrees to the left, and get attacked again. Then, once an encounter started, the computer picks from a list of different enemies for that area-each has a given percentage chance to show up. Then each enemy type has percentage chances to determine how many appear, and how many other groups are with them. So a given fight could consist of two hostile birds, or two groups of five hostile birds with a squad of bugs to help. And then, your spells' chances of working, the chance an enemy will cast a spell (and then, what kind of spell they cast), the chance of any given attack being used when they physically attack, and the chance of any given attack poisoning, paralyzing, or instantly killing a character... you guessed it. All determined by the random number generator.

Simply put, to play the later games, you had to save, and you had to get used to the save game and Quit/No Save commands. Watching the party die because a should-have-worked spell didn't, the enemy instant-killed two party members, or you got a full screen of the nastiest enemies in the game generally falls under the heading of "shit happens".

The Bonus Boss Ozma in Final Fantasy IX can just as easily wipe out a level 99 party as he can be beaten by a level 1 party; winning or losing depends entirely on what attacks Ozma decides to use.

Final Fantasy X-2 features the Sphere Break mini-game, necessary for acquiring the Lady Luck Dress Sphere. Aside from other issues, it is entirely impossible to progress when your core number comes up 1. (The objective of the game is to combine one of your four base numbers with one or more of the twelve other numbers on the board to create a multiple of the core number, with points being awarded for using more of the other numbers at a time; since each of your four base numbers is already a multiple of 1, the round is over before you get to use any of your scoring tiles.) If this happens even one round, out of the twenty rounds you have to win the only important match, it can ruin your combo bonus and make winning impossible, and the closer you came to winning, the greater the odds that the computer would start doing this.

Ooh, boy, Final Fantasy IV. Where to start? Rydia's additional summons (Bomb, Cockatrice, Mindflayer, and Goblin), the Pink Puff Tail that gets you the best armor (that one even more so because the enemies that drop it only appear in one room in the entire game.), and in the DS version, the additional tails and the Rainbow Pudding. The Rainbow Pudding is particularly irksome, because it's the only way to complete the DS-exclusive Namingway sidequest. Speaking of the DS version, the Bonus Boss, Geryon, and the other Bonus Boss, Proto-Babil. General strategy for those two bosses are: Equip the Adamant Armor on all characters (not an easy feat itself, because of the aforementioned Pink Puff Tail), and pray.

In the DS game Master of the Monster Lair (that's Dungeon Maker outside the US) the boss of the 5th floor is an Iron Golem who takes 1 damage from nearly all attacks. The only way to deal significant damage to him is to hope that your sword randomly triggers its one-hit KO attack. And even then, it only deals 100 of the 300-or-so HP the boss has, so you have to get really lucky 3 times before the boss's strong attacks kill you.

Look The Other Way, a luck-based minigame found in the Minigame Zone of Super Mario RPG, gives you exactly a 50/50 chance of winning, and the prize is randomly chosen and nearly always junk. However, you have a very small chance of winning powerful items like the party-healing Kerokerocolas, invincibility-granting Red Essences, and the game's real prize, the Star Egg, which deals 100 damage to all enemies and can be used unlimited times for no cost (fortunately, the Egg itself is always given out with the 100th win, so getting it is only as random as winning 100 times is). Playing the minigame is fortunately free, but expect to spend a very long time playing it if you want to nab that Egg.

There is one battle in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story that actually has a serious luck factor. The giant Bowser fight against the Monty Mole train has a time limit of sorts; if you do not destroy the train before it crosses the bridge at the end of the rails, you lose. This means that you only have a fixed number of turns to win the fight. Bowser's experience level and stats actually do not matter at all during giant fights, which means that only skill matters... supposedly. All factors considered, this battle actually has tight requirements on how many attacks you can screw up and still win, and these requirements solely depend on the number of times the train uses its bomb attack instead of its Goomba attack. Bowser's fire itself is not enough to kill the train; you must counter the bomb attack at least once to do enough damage to win. If the train never uses a bomb attack, you can execute every move perfectly and still lose.

In one mission of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, the player has to save a girl from monsters. While there are abilities that can draw the attacks away from her, sometimes the monsters will all decide to ignore the taunts, gang up and kill her in one turn anyway—meaning you have to pray that she can dodge the attacks.

Icewind Dale 2 proper was somewhat about this, featuring some bosses who use "x% chance your party all dies" spells, but the tactics mod is absolutely brutal. The dragon in the snake/amazon level is immune to all hold spells (as in, anything that would render him immobile), all death spells, it has 300 hp, resistance to every type of damage. Oh, and he has 99 damage attacks 4 times a round while every so often hitting your party with ~100 damage AoE acid attacks. Mind you this is when your party's tank has a grand total of, at maximum, 250 hitpoints. The only way to beat him is to hope your pre-placed delayed blast fireballs and skull traps take out enough of his hitpoints to let your tank take him out in 2-3 rounds or else its all over. Did I mention his attacks also stun and he constantly casts fear? The myriad ways you can be fucked over beyond recovery each round with a single throw of the dice make it the pinnacle of luck-based mission.

This can happen against enemies that use any of the various "save or die" effect spells like flesh to stone or disintegrate if you're not using the appropriate defenses like death ward or protection from petrification. The game is also automatically over if the main character is killed, even if you have other party members who are able to revive a character or restore the them back to normal.

Learning spells from scrolls in these and other D&D-based games. It has a % chance of failure, presumably you read a scroll and either learn the spell or not, the scroll disappears anyway. Save Scumming kills the whole idea, however.

The 8-bit computer game tie-in to the film Willow features a blatant example of this. Remember the part in the film where the eponymous Willow releases Madmartigan from his prison cage? In the game, you have two blank cages: one random cage contains Madmartigan, the other contains Death (yours). Heads you proceed, tails you lose a life.

Fadroh. Unless you want to spend days farming wind magnus for Xelha, Gibari, and Mizuti, the whole boss battle hinges upon when that Orb of Magical Offense comes up in his hand; if you haven't had at least three or four good turns to wear him down, you're done. The whole card-based battle system comes with luck elements, but this battle just cranked it Up to 11.

The Duel Boss of Xelha Vs. the Ice Goddess. It's basically a card flip minigame. You get a choice of seven or eight cards, and have to match it with the card chosen by the Ice Goddess. Get it wrong? Xelha takes a hit. And for completionists, there's a Camera magnus hidden in there, which you need to use to take one picture for 100% Completion. It's entirely possible to easily win the battle but not take the picture, which is just as, if not more, frustrating for people seeking to achieve perfection in this game (which is a very hard task, given this game doesn't have a New Game+ and there's plenty of items that can be unobtainable, including Boss pictures). And then it repeats all over again for the Wizard Shadow battle...

Rare Portraits of your characters. Sure, they have very low chances of dropping per camera shot, but since you can simply equip someone with all the cameras you have and waste away your turns taking pictures while fighting Shawras in Moonguile Forest, they're not bound to be a bother, right? Wrong. There's two particular Rare Portraits that can only be taken in the grand total of ONE specific boss battle ( Malpercio in Algorab Village, in case you're wondering). This is the only time in the entire game (sans the epilogue, that is) where Mizuti's mask is off. If you don't getboth the Maskless and Mega Rare Mizuti Shots in this battle, then they're gone. It doesn't help that this is a very easy boss, and that this is a Guide Dang It! because there's no indication in-game (other than the missing blanks alongside the other portraits in the Magnus List) that there's something missable in this battle, and by the time you've realized it, there's a fair chance it's too late by then.

The Trail of Souls is this for those aiming perfect completion. It basically amounts to you playing a forward-scrolling third-person shooter in which you have to shoot down waves of enemies as they approach your ship so you don't have to deal with them (shooting down full waves gives you reward magnus or a speed boost, as you're not supposed to fall too far behind your guide). The problem is, these enemies are unique to this area, and you cannot revisit it, which means that if you don't purposely leave at least one wave alive and let it attack you, you won't be able to take the pictures of the two different types of enemies in the area. Moreover, one of these guys is the only enemy in the entire game that drops Frost Caps (otherwise mediocre armor), and there's one item that can also be lost if you don't blow the wave to oblivion. In other words, unless you're lucky enough to encounter both enemy types in a single sacrifical wave, have the one enemy type who drops the missable item drop it, have the enemies last long enough for you to take pictures of both of them and make sure to kill the wave that drops the missable Secret Recipe magnus, you will not see that perfect Magnus List. There's 100% Completion, and then there's Baten Kaitos.

The Bunny Races in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is completely based on luck. All you can do is pick one bunny (or two "perfecta") and hope for the best. Getting at most 100 points is required to trade in for a key item needed to recruit a powerful inventor.

A scary number of battles in The Last Remnant can turn into this, due to the fact that the AI randomlyassigns what each union is allowed to do at the start of each turn. Including heal. This can result in a unit getting beaten down to critical HP and starting the turn without the sensible option of trying to heal their HP, usually resulting in them getting wiped and usually a game over.

Day Of The Idea: Piizu is an entirely luck based mission, he can read your mind to predict your attacks, so what must you do to damage him? Confuse your entire party and hope you attack him instead of your own party. He has only 200 HP, so one hit should take him down rather quickly.

In Wild AR Ms 1, the only way to get into the Bonus Dungeon "The Abyss", you had to use a teleporter and hope it malfunctioned and sent you there, which happened rarely. Since the Abyss is a Brutal Bonus Level, you'd naturally have to go back and heal outside of the Abyss at some point. Good luck getting back in!

ClaDun 's Rangeon (random dungeon) has the monster level, item drop rate and chance of items having rare titles change based on the type of gate you enter at the end of each floor. Regular Gates have little to no effect on these three variables. Angel Gates never raise the monster level by more than 1 and never lower the drop rate or rare title rate. Demon Gates and Hell Gates are guaranteed to raise the monster level, and lower the drop rate and rare title rate, with Hell Gates having more severe effects. Gamble Gates can go either way. There's always at least one gate at the end of each floor of the dungeon, but it's random which gate or gates are there, as well as whether or not there's an exit portal. All the gates' effects become greater as you reach deeper floors of the dungeon, and at the point where an Angel Gate is able to raise the drop rate and rare title rate by 40 or 50 each, a single Hell Gate can ramp up the monster level by hundreds. Even though your characters can only be level 99 at the max, enemies aren't subject to that level cap, and a Hell Gate late enough can pit you against level 300-400 monsters, leaving you no option except to run for the exit...if there is one.

Minor example in Mass Effect 2 on Insanity difficulty. At one point during Archangel's recruitment mission, you need to close a couple of doors. However, enemies are running at the doors and if one reaches the threshold, the door reopens and you have to start again. If you do not have the right class and weapon or power combination, it is entirely possible for an enemy krogan to run all the way to the door without dying no matter what you throw at it. Basically, the only way you can win this mission in a lot of cases is if the krogan AI randomly decides to stumble or doesn't spawn until it is too late to reach the door before it closes.

Tales of Phantasia has the Abyss of Thor, where to get to the Time Machine, the party has to find a skeleton key in one of 8 chests (which is chosen randomly) and use it on one of 8 doors (chosen randomly as well), which may lead to the destination, but will often as well lead to a room with a spell for Arche or back to the entrance (so yes, even trying to leave may become a challenge of nerves if you're unlucky). And to make matters worse, the puzzle is resetted every time you enter the chamber.

In Tales Of Link, no matter how good your team is, it is possible either the enemy you are fighting will target tiles you have no way of switching in time or attack you too quickly to whittle its health down. This is made worse in any mission with Iron Stance, which reduces all damage dealt to an enemy by five times unless you can break its stance. Whether or not you can do this relies entirely on the Random Number God.

Some bosses in Dark Souls can be this, your survival dependent on whether or not they choose to use their large, damaging nuke attacks.

The Son of Sun in Chrono Trigger. If you have fire-resistant armor, this is an easy fight. If not, then prepare yourself for a wall of pain. The boss itself is immune to your attacks, and doing so results in a devastating counterattack. Around the boss rotate five flames. One of these flames will damage the boss if attacked, the other four will result in another nasty counterattack. Also, every now and then, the boss will shuffle the flames so you have to find the weak one all over again. And if you try to smartass your way around it by using a tech that hits everything, they'll destroy your whole party with counterattacks. The good news is, the boss itself has very little HP, so a few good turns without a shuffle will generally finish it.

Battle Slots makes every battle a Luck Based Mission, in that both you and your opponents use slot machines to do battle.

The browser based Billy vs. SNAKEMAN is chock full of this to the point that the game's major antagonist is literally "RNG". This may be because the majority of the game mechanics are based around dice rolls.

The Battle of South Roundtop in SaGaFrontier2. Unlike every other strategy segment where you're either heavily favored or at least just slightly disadvantaged, this is brutal. Victory hinges on 1 - Killing the Dragon's unit fast. 2 - Suffering very few if any casualties. and 3 - Making a wall of Meat Shields just out of range of the Big Bad before the turn counter triggers his script to go insane. 4 - Walk straight up to the freaks on the turn the script triggers. 5 - For the love of God defend. 1 and 2 are narrow but doable odds, but doing them AND keeping your units within range of the remaining enemies and not making a mistake of crossing the line in the sand tanks the odds completely.

Most Boss Battles. Between A.I. Roulette, Critical Hits, One-Hit Kill attacks, and status effect spells, things are going to be hectic. This is particularly bad in the early game, where status protection is very limited and you don't have instant death protection at all.

The Final Boss normally isn't too bad, but if you want to get the New Game+ endings, there are two points where you have to fight him with only two party members. He has an unavoidable One-Hit Kill attack, Ivy is usually slower than him, and you can't buy max revive items at that point (though if you bought a stockpile on a previous run, it'll carry over into New Game+). Have fun.

All three contests the pig arena. Not only are the quiz bowl questions random (which makes sense), but the portions that are decoded are as well. On some runs you might get a totally decoded question, other times it might be complete gibberish. The arena is also a bad offender, since the combat system is such a Luck-Based Mission to begin with; a single miss or critical hit can change the course of the whole event.

.hack//Quarantine's final dungeon is 10 floors deep and a large number of the enemies require using the Data Drain skill to defeat. The Data Drain skill will start causing random negative side-effects to start happening if you use it too much, such as giving you an instant Game Over. To make matters worse, each room can spawn anywhere from 1-4 enemies. If the game is feeling merciless and decides to throw 4 enemies at you too many times, you're almost guaranteed to get the Game Over from overusing Data Drain. Even if you take every precaution and the dungeon is kind enough to spawn a normal amount of enemies, it's still very easy to end up rolling the Game Over halfway through. The Bonus Dungeon has the same idea, except it is 15 floors deep instead.

Fallen London: While every single statcheck qualifies to a degree, there is still some influence from you. The real qualifiers are every single check that is "A matter of luck", as the tooltip helpfully informs you. They're always looked at with certain derision, making large concentrations of them quite hateable due to simple statistics: Passing all those luck rolls becomes increasingly unlikely the more you do.

Polythreme is a serial offender: Almost everything you can do there is a matter of simple luck. The most you can do is manipulate the odds a little with your card deck, but other than that it's all coin tosses. Fortunately, for the Fascinating and Investigating progress stories, you can bribe your way through, though it gets expensive as you go. Still, the initial stages only take items you can acquire there without luck checks, helping a bit with the frustrating amount of coin-tosses.

The Tale of the Fidgeting Writer is a repeatable storyline as infuriating as it is profitable. Mechanically, it's little more than a long game of Double or Nothing, with every step beyond the first having a small fee. Despite the decent odds in every step, the chances of getting the final prize are minimal, though it's also very, very valuable. Taking into account all the expenses and the turns taken to acquire them, it's still one of the most profitable things you can do, but it doesn't help when you wipe out at the last step. Thankfully, however, each step has a less valuable consolation prize you can snatch with no questions asked. Ideal for when you can just feel the Random Number God is about to backstab you.

Avalon Code's Judgment Link contests have a horribly-designed scoring system — when someone drops the ball, the last person to touch it before them gets a point, first to three points wins. As a result, even if you play perfectly, it's possible to still lose because of when your three computer opponents decided to screw up.

The Final Boss can only be beaten if you grab him & your pawn finsihes him off or your pawn grabs him & you finish him off. If your pawn doesn't feel like fighting, you can't win.

There's also an optional quest that requires you to kill a dragon very early in the game. Doing so at that point would probably take around 30 minutes but he can suddenly fly away at any time even if his wings are broken or he's stunned & he does so often that you probably won't even have enough time to take the first of his several health bars. If that happens the quest is labeled as failed. You can come back & try again later though.

The Tribunal expansion for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind includes a Match Maker side quest where you help a woman, who is too busy with work, find a husband. You can find three men to set her up on a date with. Whether the date is successful or not is up to a random chance; you can give each of the men advice which increases the odds of success, but never above 67%. If successful, one man gives you nothing as a reward, the second gives you an enchanted belt, and the third gives you the artifact weapon "the Bi-Polar Blade."

In the original SNES Star Fox, there is a secret boss in the form of a slot machine. It can only be defeated by hitting three lucky 7s. Depending on how nice the RNG feels, this can take 30 seconds or five minutes, and on rare occasions, more than an hour. And even if you do win, your reward is essentially a perpetual "THE END" screen.

Getting a medal on Star Fox 64's Sector Z stage is a matter of praying that the game registers one of your shots on each missile as the killing shot, and not those of your allies who are also shooting the missiles with sustained laser fire.

Sigma Star Saga has this bad with its random encounters, in which you are beamed into one of several different ships for battles. The problem is that there are a few larger ships that are difficult, and in some cases, impossible to navigate between enemy fire and yes, even natural terrain. There are even a few encounters throughout the game where it takes place completely within a very small corridor, roughly half the height of the larger ships.

Heavy Weapon has multiple "waves" for each level. Each type of wave contains a fixed set of enemies, and lasts for about half a minute. The luck part comes on the fact that each "wave" is chosen at random, so you may be fighting powerful enemies over and over again if you're really unlucky.

E4: Every Extend Extra Extreme. Getting high scores, especially in the timed mode, depends largely on getting enemies to randomly spawn in fortunate enough positions that you can rack up chains in excess of 2,000.

The Web GameZombo Buster Rising has a boss that's a huge step up in difficulty from the levels due to this trope. His AI uses abilities randomly- spawning a crypt that spawns a constant stream of 1hp zombies, summoning a zerg rush of the game's Elite Mooks including at least 3 Giant Mooks, healing all the mooks on the screen, or taking a step forward (if he gets too close after 4-5 steps, he instakills you with a massive punch). Heaven help you if he decides to step forwards a few times in a row, or if he spawns two waves contain over 5 giant mooks in a row- it becomes nearly impossible to win. If you're lucky, he wastes his turns doing the healing move when there aren't that many mooks around.

Simulation Game

Several GUILT missions in Trauma Center: Under the Knife, due to the wildly unpredictable behaviors of some of the parasites.

Deftera is prime example of this trope, because if the like-colored guilt refuse to separate, you will lose.

Wing Commander IV had this built into gameplay in the form of missiles, which 1) could maybe be distracted from you by judicious use of decoys, and 2) if they hit you, were either a whole lot of damage or a One-Hit Kill. This meant that a large part of whether you won a particular mission depended on how lucky you were with the Decoys you dropped: be lucky and you won, be unlucky and you could easily run out of Decoys and die; and both times you were piloting your fighter just as well.

Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War's Mission 12b, "Four Horsemen,". Even if you actually pull off your anti-radar site attack runs flawlessly, there's no sure 100% guarantee that your wingmen will — and if they don't, everyone's attack run has to be aborted and started over. (At least you're the only one who can directly cause a mission failure here.)

The above mission is rendered somewhat more trivial if you know to take the A-10 in advance, since it's capable of flying low and slow enough to give you a window to abort the attack run and turn clear without getting spotted if one of your wingmen fails. A large amount of the difficulty of this level stems from the vast majority of the game's supersonic jet fighters being too fast to pull away from an attack run at the last second without either pulling up (and thus getting spotted) or shooting past the radar (ditto) - both of which are problems avoided by the A-10.

Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation carries on the tradition with Mission 13, "The Liberation of Gracemeria". The bulk of the mission is a long and difficult air-to-ground mission, but that's only to sap your strength in preparation for fighting Ilya Pasternak. Ilya flies the game's super-fighter, which has 12-shot swarm missiles that are sometimes literally undodgeable, and your low health by the end of the mission means that even one of the missiles will probably kill you. And on top of this he takes about five times the damage of any other opponent in the game, is faster and more maneuverable than you even if you're flying the same fighter he is, and surrounds himself with dozens of tiny, lightning-fast drones that confuse, distract, and fire at you. On top of that, his fighter is stealth, which means you will randomly lose radar lock on him and target one of the UA Vs instead. It's almost impossible to win unless you catch him away from the UA Vs.

Sure, The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard there and any player can only wish their Nosferatu performed like his, but the fight isn't luck based at all. It's quite possible to reliably evade the missile spam every time if you're good enough, even on the highest difficulty.

Animal Crossing games have paintings, and generally the only person who will sells them is Crazy Redd. And guess what? Half the time the painting is a fake. Know what's worse? You don't find out until you've tried donating it to the museum. And of course, don't expect a refund.

Thankfully averted in New Leaf, where fakes have subtle differences separating them from the real ones. However, it makes an old one stand out far more, namely having the piece you need be the real one. To make matters worse, usually only one out of Redd's four pieces of art are real, making the chances even lower. It is possible to find two pieces of art that are genuine (one artwork that's always genuine and one that has a fake version, but it's the "genuine piece" of the week), but the chances of this happening are extremely rare and you can only buy one per player at a time.

The other collections can be this as well, of course; fossils, insects and fish all have different degrees of rarity per individual specimen, and are more or less randomly selected. This extends to furniture as well as their availability is randomized.

Mission 8 in Startopia has two goals: Hire 12 Zedem Monks and convert 12 other aliens. You will lose the mission a few times because the game won't give you 12 Zedem Monks before your opponent does.

This assumes you make it past Mission 2, which requires you to cure 100 patients from diseases without accumulating over 10 deaths. Pray to The God you don't get a flood of infected aliens or get an endless supply of low-skill greys with no decently-skilled ones, or else you'll invariably accumulate 11 deaths and fail the mission ridiculously fast. fortunately, the next 5 missions are less luck-dependent.

In Virtual Horse Ranch, the results of Gymkhana events have one rule: horses with higher training level place higher than horses with lower training level. Otherwise, it's completely random. In a rare not really bad example of the trope, it's a decent way to make money if you're no good at training for the skill-based events.

In The Sims 2, career chance cards can be like this. The player is presented with a scenario and must choose between two choices or ignore it.

This is a literal Luck Based Mission: although you're presented with two choices (along with ignore), neither one is necessarily correct: when you make your choice of the two options, you have a 50% chance of succeeding. The Sims 3 continues the tradition, but there's a lifetime bonus available that changes chance card options to an 80% chance of succeeding.

The X-Universe games have the "Retrieve Stolen Ship" mission category. The idea is, somebody's ship was stolen from dock and they're paying you to retrieve it. Trouble is, any time the ship in question isn't a corvette or frigate, recapturing the ship requires you to force the pilot to bail out ... which is a completely random event.

In Harvest Moon:The Tale of Two Towns, triggering date events (called "flower events" here) reaches this level. Whereas in previous games, triggering date events could come down to being in the right place, at the right time, under the right conditions, Two Towns adds the modifier of having a choice of locations for your "dates." There's a chance the proper option to trigger the flower event, rather than a regular date, won't come up. (Though since dates are the best way to improve your relation with a bachelor/ette, it's feasible to brute-force the events.)

In the same game, villager requests - especially those of A or S-rank. Often, the request will be for items you don't have, can't get in time or simply can't get period (like asking for gems or metals before the mines are open or asking for processed items when you don't have any of the Maker Sheds yet). Presumably, the player is intended to use the online connection to get the items from someone else, but that presumes you can find someone who has what you need, when you need it.

Dragon Vale has some rather nasty luck-based gameplay where dragon-breeding is concerned. Most pairings have more than one possible result, and which you get is entirely random - with the really desireable and rare dragons often having very low odds. If you don't get the one you need, you still have to wait several (real-life) hours for the breeding to be completed so you can try again. You can somewhat increase the odds of rare dragons being born by purchasing the Epic Breeding Island, but for the really rare ones, you're still chasing some very low percentages.

In the most obvious cases, however, it CAN be seen as a Perseverance-Based Mission instead - if you keep at it, you WILL get an ultra-rare Rainbow Dragon sooner or later. But where the time-limited Seasonal dragons are concerned, luck becomes a very real factor - if your bad luck stays that way for long enough, time will run out on you and the seasonal dragon will be lost forever. Or at least for a year. Unless, of course, you were trying to breed the ultra-rare Leap Year Dragon, which was only available for about a week around Leap Day... in which case your next chance will come around in 4 years or so. Shoulda' sacrificed a goat to the Random Number God, better luck in 2016...

In Hometown Story, triggering many friendship events requires to either sell or deliver the right item at the right time. A large portion of these items are sold by a travelling merchant that shows up once a day and only has a handful of them at a time. Because of this, his stock can range from "Hey, it's that thing X asked me for just yesterday" to "Finally. I've been keeping my eye out for this for two months.". Since making money is fairly easy, a recommended strategy is to just buy all the request items offered as soon as you can afford it, even if none have been requested yet.

In Pocket Stables, the horse's starting position and even which rival appearing can sometimes be a determining factor on whether you win or lose the race. Save Scumming is one way to change the position and rivals, and because the game doesn't penalize you for it, it makes it very tempting.

In Cook, Serve, Delicious, any of Crazy Dave's bets which involve making a certain amount in tips. Even if every item on your Active Menu has the Big Tipper bonus, whether or not you win the bet depends entirely on whether or not the customers actually feel like tipping, which is, of course, completely random.

Sports Game

Likewise in Wii Sports, how many errors you get (either not catching the ball, or not pitching what you inputed) will determine who the winner of Baseball is more than actual ability.

Madden NFL offers several in their "Madden Moments," which allows you to try to replicate some great moments in NFL history. The reason they are considered "great" in the first place is because they were so improbable. Specifically:

One of the most infamous is Madden 2002's recreation of the Heidi Game from 1968, which was pretty much impossible. You control the Oakland Raiders, down 39 - 29 (even though the real-life game was only a 3-point deficit) to the New York Jets - the team that would go on to win that year's Super Bowl - with only 1:05 left on the clock. Fortunately, you have all three timeouts. Still, you have 65 seconds to score two touchdowns and grab an onside kick. Nintendo Hard doesn't even come close to describing it. (Note: the Raiders won the actual game by the score of 43 - 32 with the help of a 43-yard touchdown and a fumble return for a touchdown on the kickoff.)

Also impossible was the final game in the Great Games series, which featured the Atlanta Falcons' 30 - 27 overtime win in the 1998 NFC Championship game against the Minnesota Vikings. You have to stop the Falcons' Morten Andersen, one of the most accurate kickers in history, from making a rather routine 38-yard field goal. Good luck blocking it - even lowering the AI's ability to kick field goals doesn't help.

Another was bringing the Indianapolis Colts back from a 31 - 17 deficit against the New Orleans Saints in Madden 2011. You have the ball, 4th and goal from the Saints' 5 in Super Bowl XLIV. Two timeouts and 50 seconds to work with. You'll need to score quickly and either grab an onside kick or cause a fumble — no easy task on either side. Have fun.

Ace Fishing combines this with Timed Mission, with the aptly-named Time Attack Mission sidequest. The game generates a list of 3 specific type of fish that the player could earn gold for catching. However, while you do need skill and proper equipment to reel in the fish, whether or not you'll actually encounter them before the time runs out is up to chance.

Survival Horror

Resident Evil 4 has a few items in preprogrammed locations. The rest of the items dropped by enemies and hidden in boxes or barrels are somewhat random. The game keeps track of how much ammo, money and health the player has left and decides what defeated enemies drop accordingly. The game even keeps track of how well the player is doing; defeating a lot of enemies without damage will make it more likely that the game will spawn more and harder enemies, keep taking a beat down and the game takes pity on you. One part that is completely random are the eye gems that the Novistadors drop; for a while it was thought that the color dropped depended on the color of the monster's eye at death, but this has been proven false.

There's a very neat subversion in The Evil Within. One puzzle involves inserting a plate into a locked door with the correct side facing outward to avoid a horrible death via impalement. A journal entry you find in front of it mentions a random, 50/50 chance of success, as there are no hints as to which side is correct. The unfortunate writer of the note didn't survive their attempt, which in fact is your clue: the side without that victim's blood spattered on it is the correct facing.

Happens a good deal in Five Nights at Freddy's. Bonnie and Chica might wander away soon after they show up at your door or they might decide to camp out there for a while, forcing you to expend power keeping them out. Foxy may rush your door several times even if you check on him frequently, draining your power in the process. Freddy might take his sweet time playing an Ominous Music Box Tune before jumpscaring you when the power goes out (giving the clock the chance to tick over to 6 AM), or he might cut it off early, and in the later nights he may or may not stay on stage for a while and not bother you for the beginning of the night. It's especially noticeable in 20/20/20/20 mode.

Each night in Five Nights at Vault 5 has this factor to an extent. Many aspects of the robots are randomized, and so are the terminal alerts, meaning that you can get screwed up by bad internal dice rolls. Such as an alert going off where there's an enemy robot lurking around, or an enemy who you successfully fended off by closing a door in their face has moved not too far away from you. However, the game autosaves frequently, and after it loads, there's a good chance you might get a more favorable result this time.

Third Person Shooter

Every bot-battle (except space-battles) in Star Wars: Battlefront is very luck based. No matter how much you pwn the enemy, your chances of winning are still kinda slim. This is mostly based on the sudden incompetence shown by your teammates.

Another harsh example is the Jedi Academy. You spend all the time covering the last three bookshelves, and, in the last minute, get overwhelmed by Jedi popping up out of nowhere, and, if you get hit once, you lose, if not, you win. The Jedi respawn in that last minute at random, too, meaning one time, you are safe in the middle of the room, the next, you get a saber through the heart from the guy spawning behind you.

Dark Void allows you to hijack the enemy Flying Saucers by boarding them, ripping off an access panel and then beating the pilot. This takes some time, as you have to periodically dodge turret fire and avoid getting shaken off. This would be a pretty straight-up test of skill, not even that hard, but... The luck aspect comes from the fact that if the Artificial Stupidity collides with something while you're doing this, you get hurt, and there is no way to abort the boarding sequence if you're about to die. This means you essentially have a random chance of dying without any way to stop it, especially on higher difficulties that make you easier to kill.

Gears of War has the first Berserker fight. Berserker is faster than you and has charge instant kill to start with. In one third of playthroughs, she'll immediately charge over Dom after the cutscene, leading to a Game Over. If this doesn't happen, you have to lure her to run into the doors, opening them for you. Not dodging the charge leads to instant death. You have to do this three times. Then you get her in the graveyard, where you have to kill her - acharging enemy - with a satellite which takes five seconds to align and fire (at least, it stunlocks her). You have to do this three times as well. And the whole mission has a time limit. Well, it is the hardest segment of the game, not counting the final boss. And there are three Dog Tags scattered around. Good luck getting them with that monster breathing on your back.

Warframe is rather notorious for this. Want to build a new weapon? Time to hope the resources you need will drop. Looking for a rare mod? Good luck finding it with all of the useless ones cluttering up the drop tables. The Warframes Vauban and Hydroid are particularly egregious examples. Vauban's components can only be obtained through random alerts; miss them, and you probably won't get another chance at that part for a couple months. Meanwhile, Hydroid's frustration comes mainly through the multiple levels of RNG you'll need to put up with. To even access the boss that drops his parts, you'll need to farm certain rare enemies for four different kinds of beacons that each require different quantities, all to craft a key to access the boss's mission. Once you've done that, you need to hope that the boss drops the part you need, or else you'll have to fight him again (and woe betide you if you've run out of keys). There's a reason these two are the only Warframes the fans consistently recommend buying with Platinum.

Kid Icarus: Uprising has a sidequest version with the chamber to unlock the Gemini Orbitars. The chapter itself (Chapter 6) isn't difficult, but the chamber will only open if Pit defeats Dark Pit in one particular room and then explores said room. However, there's only a 50% chance on any given playthrough that Dark Pit will spawn in the room (and Dark Pit can't be lured into said room from a different spawn point, either). If Dark Pit doesn't spawn there, then the Gemini Orbitars can't be unlocked on that run through the level.

Splatoon 2: Salmon Run mode doesn't allow you to select your own weapons, boss Salmonids spawn randomly, and each round has a chance of changing the map, such as by reducing the available space. If you get stuck with a weapon that's ill-suited to the bosses that spawn, you're probably in trouble unless your teammates are really on point. And good luck fending off those feral Salmonids in Glowfly rounds with a charger.

Tower Defense

Cursed Treasure 2: Going for a brilliant rating on Level 20. With two lighthouses (requiring seven cut-outs each to turn them from foe-helpers to weapons), two pirate ships (requiring ten cut-outs each to sink), close water shortcuts for diving and airborne foes, one lousy mana pool, and only two places for the powerful crypts (one of them not available until you have used cut-out once to clear the trees and thrice to clear away a sacred stone that blocks building there). Unless enough foes drop mana potions to enable frequent cut-outs (and meteor to eliminate Iron Guard champions), you will lose gems.

Turn Based Strategy

In Front Mission 4, the evade stat was changed from how it operated in its predecessor. Whereas in FM 3 (and most RPGs) evade functioned as a penalty to the attacker's accuracy (which stacked with other accuracy-reducing factors like cover and would merely reduce the number of hits a round of machine gun fire or a shotgun blast would land), in FM 4 evade was a wanzer's base chance of completely evading an attack, calculated completely separately from all other factors. There were various conditions and exceptions, but since some wanzers could easily have an evade rating of well over 50%, it would become quite possible (even common) for a wanzer to come under fire from an entire army and come out without even a scratch. This varied in function from being the only thing stopping you from crushing your enemy like a lame hedgehog in some missions, to being the only thing standing between you and a horrible death in others.

In the first American GBA Fire Emblem, on the chapter where you have to protect Zephiel, you need to protect Jaffar and get Nino (a level 5 MAGE) to talk to him to unlock a side-quest. Unfortunately, it's very possible for him to get killed before you're anywhere near, forcing you to restart if you want any chance at the side-chapter. In fact, ZEPHIEL HIMSELF can be killed quickly on the Hard difficulty, forcing you to restart, period. Oh, and did I mention Ursula starts moving on the last turns and can easily ruin that one attempt that doesn't get sidewinded by luck? God forbid if there are any one-of-a-kind treasures on the map too, and accessed faster by the enemy Thieves no less. Oh wait. There are. Too late.

Speaking of Fire Emblem, in Path of Radiance, Ike's ultimate battle with the Black Knight requires you to beat him within a certain number of turns (the game continues if you can survive these turns without beating him, though Nasir dies...maybe. However, even having reached level 20, acquiring the Aether skill, and using several stat boosting items, the only to win is playing through the mission several times and hoping that Ike was able to pull off two Aether attacks within the turn limit.

While we're on the subject, there's critical hits. Any unit, ally or otherwise, can get them, but normally the high stats of your party mean the only times they're an issue are when myrmidons attack generals, and that will still only do single digit damage. However, on Hard Mode for several games, normal enemies get both power boosts and the critical-friendly weapons. This means that many enemy attacks have a chance of one-shot-killing your units, and you often have several of these on a map in a game where death is permanent. Not the best way to go...

There is always at least one chapter where you are storming a castle. This castle is a maze, treasure chests are scattered randomly through it (unless you are lucky, in which case they are collected in rooms), and between one and five Thief class NPCs will always begin placed on the map. These thieves will make a beeline for the chests, and then race for the exit. There is no way you will ever beat them to the chests, but if you get unlucky bashing your way through the enemy force, you may not be able to kill them and retrieve your treasure in time, which is the true challenge.

Although it's relatively easy to block the exit with your Fragile Speedster (read Pegasus Knight) and force them to take the long way around, as in most cases the thieves will run from you rather than fight, either making them cower in a corner away from your units or go suicidal and try to run past your main group in a desperate race for freedom.

To a lesser extent, character growth is a Luck Based Mission since stat gains are randomly determined. Some characters may be consistently good, but too many go between spectacular failures or battlefield-dominating beasts. It's most infuriating with characters you're forced to use, like Eliwood in the seventh game.

Thracia 776, the fifth game in the series, introduces a number of "gameplay mechanics" that make playing the game infuriating: healing wands can miss at random, all units - player and enemy - have a small chance of getting to move a second time that turn, and the game's selling feature - the ability to capture enemy units and take their items - relies on you not accidentally killing them by scoring a critical hit. Even worse are the levels themselves: Chapter 11x is a map where you must rescue a prisoner being attacked by soldiers. It is completely up to chance whether or not she survives before you can free her.

Some chapters and some games are worse than others, but the Hard Modes in most Fire Emblem games, unfortunately, rely on this as their main source of difficulty increase. At worst, there are chapters which are virtually un-winnable without cheats and with no character fatalities (which are notably permanent in the series) because the mathematical probability of all of your characters dodging enough attacks to survive is essentially zero. Chapter Four of Fuuin no Tsurugi is a prime example. Basically the entire game of Radiant Dawn when played on Hard Mode (which was actually called "Manic Mode" in Japan; when they localized it, they did away with the Easy setting, so the Western Easy is the Japanese Normal, Normal is Hard, and Hard is Maniac) is like that too; impossible without ridiculously-good luck and an absurd amount of free time and patience.

Fire Emblem Awakening's Lunatic+ difficulty practially runs on this during the first couple of chapters. While Lunatic is somewhat manageable through clever use of your Tactictian and Frederick, Lunatic+ adds a layer of randomness which places it firmly in this trope, by assigning random skills to your enemies in the form of souped up versions of the regular ones exclusive to this difficulty. One particular combo that will ruin any flawless strategy is Hawkeye and Luna+ because it makes the aformentioned heavily armored Frederick completely useless as a much-needed damage sponge. If any enemies during the first chapters gets this combo or too many of them gets Luna+, then you have to reset the chapter until they get a more manageable combination of skills, because you will not survive. Period.

Final Fantasy Tactics has the Roof Of Riovanes Castle mission, where you lose if Rafa/Rapha, a computer-controlled ally, is killed. Unfortunately, she begins the fight closer to the enemies than any of your characters, one of them can kill her in a single counterattack, and her AI can be charitably described as "suicidal." Because of her (and the enemies) high speeds, it's entirely possible (if not probable) that you'll lose the battle before you get a single turn.

There is one trick to keeping her from going kamikaze on you. Have a faster unit use a Cure series spell that is within her movement range, and will activate after her turn. Rafa will move into said spell's range 99% of the time. Of course, having a faster unit is the problem, as Rafa herself is quite fast...

Or the "naked strategy." At least in the original version, enemies always go for the weakest target. Bring one or two nude soldiers in your lineup and the really dangerous enemies will nearly always ignore her.

Even worse than the Riovanes Rooftop is the Walled City of Yardrow battle when you first meet Rapha, at least in the PSP rerelease. Your enemies include two Ninjas, who will always go before your own ninjas(if you even have one), and they start close enough to Rapha to immediately run over and throw a Katana at her, collectively killing her.

Tactics A2 has a late-game mission that forces you to protect a team of five underleveled Moogles against a powerful enemy clan. The Moogles have two members that can be described as, at best, incompetent, and at worst outright traitorous. The first is the Thief, with all the low defensive powers the class implies and considerably less than the intelligence needed to make the class not die, particularly for a Moogle Thief. The second is a Gadgeteer, whose Pandora spells hit either your entire party or the enemy's randomly, and who does love his Haste Pandora. Keep in mind, if a single Moogle falls, you've lost.

There's a repeatable quest where you spar with those moogles to train them. Every time you beat it they get stronger; run it a few times and they will have no trouble beating the enemy clan senseless as long as you provide a little healing.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is horrible when it comes to these, thanks to new rules for the Last System which - in many instances- turns a randomly occurring critical hit on your side into something to be feared. Examples of such laws are "No knockbacks" (a critical hit automatically knocks the enemy back) and "No dealing more than 50pts of damage" (a critical will almost certainly push the damage above that). What about "No targeting units two or more squares away"? Well, since a critical hit will knock an enemy one square away so it ends its turn two squares away from you, oops! It counts as a violation. Normally, breaking a law doesn't punish you too badly, but when it comes to the Clan Trials, breaking a law counts as instant failure.

In another example from A2, the highest-ranking Clan Trial for "Aptitude I" presents you with six identical barrels and asks you to find the "winning" one in two rounds. You don't have enough time to check all six in two rounds.

Then there is the trial for "Teamwork-Aptitude". Clearing the Rank 5 trial gives your clan the ever-useful "MP Efficiency" clan privilege. Problem is, it all comes down to where the Jar spawns. Sometimes it spawns is always past a group of enemies who will inflict Confuse with 100% Accuracy (Making you often waste TWO turns, that of the Confused unit and that of the one that will have to attack the Confused unit back to their senses). And if you hope to use a wise combination of speed-ground Viera and Gria equipped with hard-earned Ninja Tabis and Ribbons...the monsters will use Roulette, the game's titular and true Luck Based Attack.Namely, it kills an unit at random.It can either make your day by thinning the enemy numbers, or ruin your plans completely.

Another really nasty one is a mission requiring you to intentionally step on a series of traps while not using the attack function. Except that half of these traps will inflict the charm status, which causes your party members to attack each other. Which in this case will instantly fail the mission.

Finished all 300 missions and are doing The Last Quest? You might as well hack your game when you face off against the Thrill Seekers. You fight against a Juggler/Time Mage, Seer/Illusionist, a Ranger, and two Tonberry Kings. The moogle will spam Haste and Quicken on his party, the Ranger will either hide or use Mirror Elixir (reduces HP and MP to 1) on you, the Seer will spam Magick Frenzy (hits targets with magic and then the user's weapon), and the Tonberry Kings will just one hit kill you. Now they all go at least two or three times [[before your party can even take a turn in the beginning, so it is possible to outright lose without even doing anything. Even with careful planning, you still need god's luck and hope that you can survive long enough to take the enemies down.

Most high scores, including many 450s, in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin relies on abusing A.I. Roulette or luck damage. The day-to-day guide for Wedding Ring is particularly bad because when the Infantry is starting its HQ capture, it is in range of the B-Copter that is expected to attack the T-Copter instead. And of course, if the Infantry takes luck damage on the next two enemy phases, you will lose because the enemy will have an Infantry taking your HQ. But this is nothing to Metro Map, which despite being a map that desperately needs a Day-To-Day guide just loves to horribly screw over the sole one that is available.

The mission "Greyfield Strikes" is a particularly insidious example; every other turn, Admiral Greyfield will shut down one of your unit types, preventing them from doing anything that turn. If he chooses to shut down your Landers or Gunboats, good luck getting any of your isolated land units to the mainland where the enemy is before the enemy snipes them into oblivion.

And in Dual Strike, just surviving on Crystal Calamity in Normal Campaign is this if you don't cheap out money forces or Colin. If Black Hole sends the Black Bomb toward Red Star, you're screwed, simple as that, as you will get cut off from the silos.

Getting all of the rare and legendary equipment in Disgaea. Especially the ones that only appear as a boss's stealable equipment, so you have to hope the Random Number God decides that it has a rarer version than usual this time. Or the items that never appear as enemy equipment, like the absolute cheapest weapons and the usable items.

It gets even worse when you try and find RESIDENTS which you can use to soup up your weapons stats beyond levelling them up normally, sometimes they will be on near impossible to reach terrain, You must be the one to kill them to recruit them, and they attack both allies and enemies near them. It's even more luck based when you have to reroll shop loadouts to find the resident type you want (You may even find a Gladiator in a healing item for crying out loud!)

If you get the Map extension that inflicts the Gamble status in Makai Kingdom, you either hit the enemy for all it's health or Whiff entirely, the same goes for your party as well since the extension will affect everyone on the current map.

Godzilla 2 War Of The Monsters for the NES used an on-screen slot-machine to decide how much damage you deliver and take in each battle with the monsters. It was so very random, you could take out Godzilla or Ghidorah with a simple gun on a truck meant to deliver parts for the Moonlight SY3, or conversely, watch as Baragon took out the Moonlight SY3. How you rolled at the start mostly determines the entire game.

Heroes of Might and Magic IV, the final map of the Order Campaign could inadvertently become this. In a locked-off area of the map you are given a computer ally who story-wise is holding off the big bad to buy you time to find the Macguffin. The Luck comes in with the fact that the 'mission victory condition' is specifically set so that YOU must be the one to kill the Big Bad, yet it is entirely possible that your 'speed bump' of an ally will somehow manage to take him out first, making the mission un-winnable.

Worse yet, it's possible to never encounter Deep Ones (or at least not until very late in the game), and until you capture a live Deep One, you can't get any decent armor. Once you capture one, it's still possible to do the research in the wrong order (d'oh!). Luckily there's another bug in the game that lets you research the best armor without ever having the prerequisites. (And that's only a few of the design flaws.)

In most of the Suikoden series, fights are fair. Even Pahn's duel with Teo in the first game is winnable if you take a few precautions. Then Suikoden II comes along. Normally the major battles are fair and you lose only when it's scripted. However, one of the fights involves saving Ridley from an ambush - if he falls, you fail. It's possible that the low-defense Ridley Unit will be defeated and captured before your other units even appear on the map.

Fortunately, it's possible to rescue Ridley at a later date if you fail here. In fact, the dialogue for the next mission assumes that you failed - they will discuss Ridley's rescue while he's standing right there. (Someone screwed up the dialogue epically for this mission, as it also mentions "Valeria's unit" even if you chose to recruit Kasumi instead.)

Major battles in II as a whole are luck based, since most units can only take two points of damage and it's mostly/all luck whether an attack will damage or not. The only reason why people don't complain about it much is because most of the major battles are just too easy even if the player gets a bit luck screwed.

A perfect strategy and mastery of the numbers can still get turned on its head when the Random Number Generator gets ornery on you in Yggdra Union, especially if you're trying to get a fast clear bonus on a mission and secure bonus equipment (which can require you to plan to lose some fights). A unit with a high Luck stat will get "flash" (critical) strikes frighteningly regularly and turn a sure-thing battle against you entirely too easily. Of course, having a lot of Luck on your side grants you the same consideration...

Getting the best outcome of Fallout Tactics' Springfield mission usually boils down to the AI failing to kill its unarmed hostages or you succeeding at a lucky hit that knocks down one of the units responsible for arming the bomb on the power plant. Stealth and picking the right troops to cover each objective helps to some degree, but once the bullets start flying it's really just down to the dice.

The 2013 version of Space Hulk can devolve into this, based off of several criteria: where, and how many, Genestealers spawn each turn; how many Command Points you generate in a turn; and where randomly-placed/facing Terminators spawn in. Technically, since everything short of "move to this spot" is determined by a roll of the dice this applies everywhere, it's most obvious in the above areas. One mission may flood you with more enemies than even multiple Terminators on Overwatch can handle and you die in 2-3 rounds; you then might replay and merrily march to the mission objective without significant hassle.

The ever-useful Iron and Diamond ores are randomly scattered underground. Unless worldgen mercifully spawned you above a pre-generated mineshaft, expect to do a LOT of digging before finding any considerable amount.

Prior to the Pretty Scary Update, note pre-release 12w40a, to be specific finding Slimeballs was also tough, since they can only be obtained from Slimes, which were surprisingly rare, and only spawn in large enough caves in the bottom ground layers. Even if all conditions for their spawning are satisfied, there still are several other monsters that can spawn in their stead.note Y<40, so you have to be fairly close to bedrock. The space must be large enough to spawn a max-sized slime, or none will spawn at all. 90% of the game area just plain doesn't spawn slimes. And even when the game tries to spawn a slime in a valid area, there's a 90% chance it just says "fuck it, no slimes this go" and doesn't. The Pretty Scary Update simply allowed them to spawn in Swamp biomes at night.

In order to start growing pumpkins and melons, you have to either find their seeds (a random drop from chests in a mineshaft, which isn't even guaranteed to spawn near your starting area) or wild grown ones (melons in jungles, pumpkins in several biomes including forests, plains, hills and taiga). Since melons are used in healing potions, and pumpkins are necessary to build all kinds of Golems, you need some luck if you want either of them. Once you get that first seed, you're pretty much set for life, but that first seed...

Even just starting the game can be ruined by poor luck. Spawn in an ocean biome? Just as in reality, oceans are enormous, even if you're not playing in a Large Biomes world. Trees, for obvious reasons, only grow on land. You need wood to, well, do anything in this game. You'll save a lot of time and effort just starting over if this happens.

Several Missions in Grand Theft Auto III, due to the Stanton/Shoreside bridge opening and closing on a timer, relied on a fair amount of luck. Unless you took the tunnel, but that's just downright suicide if you're in a hurry.

Perhaps not so much luck based as The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, but one side-mission involving the collecting of a line of dropped items became near impossible after a certain point in the game when the Mafia becomes aggressive to you. The mission takes you right through their primary neighborhood and they blow you up near instantly with their shotguns.

Rampages in Grand Theft Auto III (and its sequel, Vice City) typically require the player to destroy a certain number of gang members/vehicles within a time limit. These are very luck based as targets appear at random. Also, since vehicles and pedestrians often only spawn in the area when the player isn't looking their way, these rampages often have players frantically maneuvering the camera around, willing more targets to appear.

Joey Leone's final mission takes this to unfair levels: It's simple enough: you're the getaway driver for a crew of bank robbers. You drive them to the bank, the robbers go in, they come out, you evade the police and drive them to a safehouse and you get $10,000 for every robber who makes it back alive. It's that last part where the mission gets tricky: as you're just the driver, you can't do anything about the actual robbery and occasionally one or two of the robbers can die before even making it back to the car, reducing your take significantly. Worse yet, all of them can die during the robbery, which nets you an automatic mission failure for something that was beyond your influence.

The "Supply Lines" mission in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, in which the player must use a remote-control plane to take out five targets moving around San Fierro and return to the starting point before running out of fuel. The mission is impossible unless the second target spawns very close to the first- if you take too long to reach it, the last three targets will have spread apart by the time you reach them, and you won't have enough fuel to destroy them and make it back to base. Thankfully, the post-Hot Coffee release fixed this mission so that fuel only depletes when the gas button is pressed, making it much more manageable.

Grand Theft Auto IV features a number of missions requiring the player to evade the police. This requires the player to escape a large circle of coverage where the cops are looking, if a cop car is nearby the cops will see you and the circle will re-center. This leads to a situation where the player must escape the circle while praying that a cop car won't spawn right next to them, making all that work escaping the circle completely void. Either that, or they must escape into the Pay and Spray, hoping a cop car doesn't spawn there, as unlike previous games in the series, the Pay and Spray won't work if a cop sees you go in.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is pretty good about this during the story missions. They're hard and at times incredibly frustrating, but they're usually the same every time. The side missions are a different story. Rampage and Riding Shotgun missions are entirely based on where the enemies spawn. The lottery is, obviously, a lottery. Finding dealers and security cameras can only be accomplished through aimless driving. The list goes on. Fortunately, maps and guides exist.

Oddly enough, the lottery, obviously the most luck-based section of the game, is actually fairly predictable. To be more specific, if you buy enough of the more valuable tickets that have a chance to provide you with a safe-house, you may make a temporary loss but if you keep it up over time, you're virtually guaranteed to make a profit eventually. Take it from someone who spent about an hour trying for that safe-house: Bring enough seed money, and the tickets are infinite and easy cash. How the manufacturer stays in business is anyone's guess... On the other hand, money means nothing in that game anyway considering how ridiculously easy it is to get thanks to the idiot-proof drug trade that tells you exactly what to do at any given moment to make tons of cash. Which is just as well since the actual missions give hardly a pittance to compensate.

The later levels of Activities in Saints Row definitely qualify; Level 8 Drug Trafficking is nearly impossible when three or more FBI SUVs are ramming the dealer's vehicle at once, into other vehicles, and you still have to get across the entire city to the next buyer. The luck lies in if you can dive out of the burning vehicle, not die when it explodes, heal yourself before the Feds ventilate you, revive the dealer (who invariably gets blown up with it), take a new car, and do it all over again thirty seconds later. Unless you're an expert at picking off drivers from the passenger's seat of a moving vehicle, these missions will drive you crazy.

Insurance Fraud. You're on a road and your goal is to get hit by cars. These cars spawn at random intervals in random numbers. You only have a few minutes to get to the scoring goal (in the later levels, over 100000 dollars worth of points), and you don't even get the insurance money to make up for that horrible activity.

It a different story when you venture onto a freeway. The endless flow of speeding oncoming traffic makes this side mission ridiculously easier than if you pick an street-level intersection as instructed. Still, it's a matter of luck for the game to direct you to a district which has a freeway.

Also, take a helicopter to the mission start location. Get in it immediately after start, fly up to max elevation over the freeway, and dive out. Aim for a car. Congratulations, you just got half the money needed to win the highest level.

The Mayhem activities in the second game require a good amount of cars spawning, a good bonus car being chosen, a good region being chosen (each location randomly chooses one of several regions, some of them much better than others), and the police not constantly ramming into you and knocking you down. Have fun.

The Escort Activity. You drive a prostitute and her john around while a "Pleasure" meter builds up. When it is maxed out, you win that Level of the challenge. You are sometimes tasked with a secondary objective, such as driving to a club, during which you do not accrue any more Pleasure until it is done. Collisions, stopping the car, or firing your weapon on other vehicles will reduce your Pleasure meter. You are also being pursued by news vans who are attempting to get footage of your passengers. This fills a "Footage" meter, which ends the Activity in failure when it is maxed out. The Footage meter does not diminish. At the higher levels, you can still outdrive the news vans if you are skilled, but groups of vans will spawn randomly along your path as you escape the initial ones (much like how the police continue to spawn when you have antagonized the law). You WILL be crashed into (both reducing your Pleasure meter and increasing the Footage meter) unless you are lucky enough to have the news vans spawn with enough distance for you to try to avoid it.

Fortunately both Insurance Fraud and Mayhem are made easier if you "cheat" by using aircraft. For Insurance Fraud, you can get a head start on points and instant 100% adrenaline by stealing a plane and jumping out over the destination suburb. And the attack helicopter, armed with a Chaingun and Annihilator RPGs, makes Mayhem a lot easier.

There are three types of Events (side missions) in [PROTOTYPE]: War, Kill, and Movement. Each gives a medal based on completion time (War, Movement) or kill count (Kill). Depending on the Event, this can either be fairly easy or absurdly difficult. One Event in particular is the Raid War Event, which requires beating the enemies in 1:25:00. As if being limited to the crappy grenade launcher weren't bad enough, skill plays almost no part. Your enemy is actually the game itself. The game will, more than half the time, screw you over by either a) withholding reinforcements (namely a tank which will take out the enemies faster than you can hope to in the time limit) or b) withholding the enemies (by not spawning them). Other Events are better because they're either more generous with time, more generous with spawns, or let you use your powers.

Non-video game examples:

Board Games

Many board and card games, especially those intended for younger childrennote where the aim is mostly to distract and entertain the child, who probably lacks the experience and patience to play more serious games, are based entirely on luck, with no skill whatsoever. War, Old Maid, Go Fish, Clock Solitaire, Chutes and Ladders, the Game of the Goose, and Candyland are prime examples.

And many games that have some skill have rules that allow Unwinnable situations to arise by pure luck. An example is Sevens: if you have five Aces and Kings (or cards forming chains leading into Aces or Kings), you can kiss any chance of finishing first goodbye, and if you have all eight terminal cards (all four Aces and all four Kings), you will not go out. The flip side is if you happen to have a hand exclusively containing 5s, 6s, 8s, and 9s, you can pretty much manipulate the field however you please. If the game just happens to be Shichi Narabe (the Japanese version of Sevens which places a limit on how many times you can pass), you can force everyone to pass three times with such a hand and force them out without them being able to play a card.

There is a reason why Candyland is usually the first instance in which a child figures out how to cheat to win. It doesn't take long for the kid to figure out how to stack the pile with purple cards.

Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, and so on often explicitly have the rule "the youngest player goes first." This stacks the deck in favor of the child winning. Obviously, anyone old enough to figure that out is also probably old enough to only play such a game to entertain a young child. Tropes Are Not Bad.

The Game of Life has large depths and lots of mechanics, but the winner, especially in a 2-person game, is mostly determined by the salary drawn when you choose a career at the beginning of the game. If you get a bad draw, say $50k, and your opponent gets $90k, then almost half the game will pass before you have a chance to correct this, and it again comes down to luck. It's almost impossible to recover from that sort of setback without hoping for random luck causing you to step on the half-dozen "trade salary card" squares strewn across the board.

Battleship can have this, especially in really close outcomes. Bob has sunk Alice's entire fleet save her cruiser, which has only one square left. Alice, meanwhile, has sunk Bob's entire fleet save his destroyer, which also has one square left. From the misses Alice has already made, there's no way she won't know where the last remaining part of his ship is; it's called process of elimination. Bob, meanwhile, has a one in two chance of getting it right, and it's his turn. If G4 is a hit, he wins. If G4 is a miss, Alice finishes him at F9.

The Joker's Wild: The contestants spun a giant slot machine, whose windows would reveal various cash amounts ($25 to $200), but also hidden in there were cards with the face of the Devil. Finding a Devil card before earning $1,000 — or rarely, spinning three of the same cash amount, which won the game automatically — ended the bonus game with nothing won.

Tic-Tac-Dough had the "Beat the Dragon," where the objective was to uncover cash amounts to achieve a total of $1,000 or more, or screens reading "TIC" and "TAC" on a 3-by-3 game board before revealing the space concealing a dragon. Completing the former objective won the cash and a bonus prize package (finding "TIC" and "TAC" meant you got enough "DOUGH" to reach $1,000 automatically); finding the dragon first lost everything.

Bullseye: The contestant had an allotted number of spins (either seven or 10, depending on when in the run the episode aired) to avoid "being struck by lightning" in one of the three windows. Finding a lightning bolt ended the game automatically with nothing won. Saving grace is that finding a bullseye allowed you to freeze that window. If that was the window where the lightning was, you were scot free though you wouldn't know it. Getting bullseyes in all three windows doubled your cash total and won you the game.

The syndicated run of Break the Bank (1976) had an unnamed bonus round, where 8 celebrities had card with money underneath or beside them; the ninth celeb had a "BUST" card, which wiped out that round's winnings, though not the main game winnings; if you hit $2000 without finding the "BUST" card, you would get $5000 more.

Minute to Win It is hard enough on its own, but its Million Dollar game Supercoin definitely qualifies as a Luck Based Mission. You have to bounce a quarter off of a table and get it into a water jug 15 feet away with a 1.75 inch mouth (barely larger than the quarter itself). It'd be difficult enough even if you could aim properly, but because you have to bounce the coins off the table, you have virtually no control over where those quarters are going. Few have come close; none have succeeded.

During the early seasons of the original American Gladiators, the final Eliminator round had a channel for each contestant, one of which randomly had a Barrier Warrior at the very end, hidden behind a paper wall. In other words, one contestant got a free ride while the other had an extra obstacle. Effectively, this turned what was supposedly a game of skill into a game of chance.

The Price Is Right. Skill is not able to help you with all of the Pricing Games. If you can get it to 50/50, that's great. Otherwise, you really have to hope the Random Number God is with you.

The Wii/PC game... well, let's start by mentioning that the price of the prizes fluctuate BETWEEN GAMES. Pen and paper will not save you.

The items featured do not follow MSRPs, auction records, or any other normal way to determine an object's price, so the main game is like this too. The strategy for the main game boils down to making a lowball estimate or 1 cent, as the winner is the person who guesses the highest without going over their price, and anyone who overestimates the price is instantly eliminated. Justified, however, because if The Price Is Right DOES follow any normal pricing scheme, it would allow contestants to game the system by researching in advance. Most of the side games, however, provide multiple chances to guess an item's price with hints along the way, so contestants can at least make educated guesses.

The penultimate one ("Final Fall" a.k.a. "The Man-Eating Holes") is entirely so: there are five pits, three lead to the castle, the other two of them hides a guard (in disguise) - if the contestant chooses one of them, he/she is eliminated.

"Sumo Rings" - where the contestant wrestles an opponent, it's decided by what colored ball they pull from a box. It could be: Animal (a strong man), an actual sumo wrestler, Spud (a man in a potato costume), an Emerald Guard, Jo, or a pathetically weak man.

"Tug of War" - in the second version the contestant must choose to pull a certain rope without knowing what's on the other side. It's been a bulldozer, an elephant, Yoroi, an actual cow, etc.

"Roulette" - contestants dig in a pit for discs to tell them where they sit on a giant roulette board. The number, color or odd/even the ball lands on is eliminated.

"Prod" - a one-time game where a contestant from a team jousts a randomly chosen person with lances over a pit.

"Nautiball" - another one-time game where the contestants are randomly put into teams and play against a randomly chosen group. Possibilities: a professional volleyball team, Emerald Guards or women in swimsuits.

"Skittles" - contestants are in giant bowling pin suits (the positions are chosen by randomly picking a card) and a Rainbow Warrior pushes a giant bowling ball down a hill towards them. Sometimes the ball misses all of them; most commonly it'll hit the few at the back edges or the person at the front. The middle back person has the highest chance of success.

"Knock Knock" - a contestant has to run through a series of walls that have a choice of doors. Some are paper (two of them), one in the third wall has a net (meaning he's lost) and one or two are wood (if a contestant breaks a wooden one by running too hard into it, he gets to go through). This only counts when contestants play one at a time; when they play all together the first one hundred or so go through.

The Amazing Race has at least one "Needle in a Haystack" task per season, though they're usually put in Detours so teams don't have to do them.

Perhaps the most famous instance of this were the hay bales of Season 6. If you do the math, there was actually a seven percent chance of finding a clue if you started up the hay bales. The percentage did increase when you reduced each haybale, but there were 270 out there to begin with. Poor Lena & Kristy were out there for over 10 hours and were eliminated by Phil in the field, when Lena refused to stop unrolling Haybales. When the hay bales were revisited in Season 15, it was thankfully more merciful, but there were still one or two teams unrolling haybales for hours while another had to unroll only a couple to find the clue.

There are three guards, and two contestants on a team. Each contestant could have earned a "Get out of Jail Free Card" from an earlier skill-based mission. The problem was that after two guards, the first contestant was knocked out of the game, and the second one had to retrace the steps of the first one. That means, counter-intuitivly, that it's better to hit two guards early on. That way the second person has less of the Temple (maze) to re-do.

Far more random than the guards, is that the order of the rooms you have to complete the rooms and the location of the Temple Treasure which unlocks all the doors semi-random. That means you might get quick easy puzzles like "Turn the wheel" or you might get The Shrine of the Silver Monkey. (Try looking on youtube for "The Shrine of the Silver Monkey")

Lampshaded by the very concept of the British game show Fluke. The whole thing was based entirely around luck, and at no time could skill, stamina, strategy, knowledge or anything else have any impact on the outcome. As an example, if the end game came down to a decisive final question, it was decided by a literal coin-toss.

Deal or No Deal is entirely luck. Contestants pick one briefcase with a random amount of money and eliminate other briefcases with random amounts of money - with no way of telling what's where. The only decisions contestants get to make are when the banker periodically calls and offers to buy their briefcase for the average (rounded off to the nearest $100 or so) of all the remaining money values leaving the contestant to decide to make the deal or not.

There was exactly one non-luck based outcome on this show. One contestant inadvertently broke the cordless phone prop that the host used to call the banker - the banker then lowered his offer by $10 to compensate for 'expenses'.

Played for laughs in a That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch involving the adventures of Agent Suave, a Tuxedo and Martini super-spy being sent on a luck-based mission to a casino where all the games were things like "Guess The Weight Of A Fruitcake".

For the longest time, Pinball was accused of being in the same league as gambling machines due to being believed to rely on luck more than player skill, resulting in pinball being banned in various U.S. cities. It wasn't until a court case in which Roger Sharpe made a Skill Shot that he openly predicted that the ban was reversed.

Many of the more recent pinball machines have at least one mission where a number of shots become available on the playfield and only one (or sometimes two) will earn points and advance the player towards the Wizard Mode or a multiball. Downplayed, however, in that choosing the wrong shot will not penalize the player in most cases, and in all others, the player is welcome to try again if they lose. Examples include "The Tale of the Flying Horse" in Tales of the Arabian Nightsnote One target contains the Jewel of the Statue; the others contain nothing, "Find the Gopher" in Tee'd Offnote The gopher is hiding in one of the holes, and you are under a 30-second time limit to find him, and "Landmark Hotel" in America's Most Hauntednote One of the targets contains the elevator controls needed to defeat Herbert, the ghost who controls the building.

Podcasts

Rocher Hotel features the recurring game What's the Verdict?, in which guests have to answer incredibly silly true-or-false questions supposedly about themselves. Players have to be either incredibly lucky or at least funny- and the latter sometimes isn't even enough.

Community

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